In an era where companies are shifting their business to mobile apps, it becomes increasingly essential to decide the right technology for the success of your business. Many business owners do not know about mobile app development technologies and fail to employ or choose the right one for their business, leading to a failure.
Why is it necessary to know about the different technologies? The answer is simple; different technologies achieve different goals and targets. In fact, each of the technology offers a distinctive feature targeting your requirements. Secondly, you can choose from native, hybrid, cross-platform, and cloud-native apps. Different technologies target different platforms. In the following article, we will be discussing the two most used technologies that took the world with an impact. Native and cross-platform technologies are outdoing themselves in providing the best services. Later, we will be discussing the differences between the two types of apps.
Native App Development
Let’s start by discussing native app development. Native mobile development deals with building apps for specific operating purposes with the help of different programming languages. A typical native app gets distributed in operating systems. One is an iOS app, and the other is an Android app. These two are well known to the world with their features and designs.
A native app development company builds apps with the help of specific tools like Software Development Kit (SDK) and Integrated Development Environment (IDE). The tools decide the future of the app by making them more secure and intuitive. They allow developers to enhance the device features granting them complete access. Native app development and maintenance are costly. The Developers use Android Studio for creating apps. The Android apps with the Studio make a powerful code editor with unique developer tools.
The Android
You might now be interested in knowing about the features that differentiate an Android app from an iOS app. The Android apps feature a vast range of testing tools and frameworks. They provide Google Cloud Platform Integration, an advanced technology implemented to build highly responsive apps for huge businesses. The mobile app development has a flexible system based on Gradle that enables excellent performance with the emulator. Besides having these features, the app supports sample code importing and reusable features with the help of code templates and GitHub integration. Moreover, the app has C++ and Native Development Kit (NDK) support. You can build native apps on any operating system like Mac, Windows, etc. with Java Development Kit (JDK)
The iOS
XCode is the Android Studio of iOS. It supports Objective-C, Swift being a native of iOS. Secondly, the XCode virtually everything needed for iOS app development, from debuggers, compilers, storyboard editors to XML Interface Builder (XIB).
The XCode features iOS app compilation and debugging ARM processors, code filter, code assistant, version editor, source control, and utility for binary files and developing codes compatibles with multiple architectures. The native iOS app development company uses C++, Java, AppleScript, Python, etc. programming languages. At last, it has a codeless interface design and prototyping tool.
Cross-Platform App Development
Natives apps are a thing of the past; technological advancement has given rise to cross-platform app development that enables single code utilization across multiple operating systems. The apps created by third-party vendors make unified APIs based on native SDKs. Meanwhile, the developers combine unified API and IDE to create a single code that supports various OS.
The top few frameworks of Cross-Platform are as follows:
- React Native: React Native is built based on a JavaScript library called React and uses small codes to build a complex UI for mobile apps. However, React Native is an open-source technology that supports Ios, Android, and web apps. The React components are reusable allowing swift development. If you have a bit of experience in web development, it will be easy for you to adopt React Native. At last, React Native apps are built with UI, shadow, and JavaScript thread architectures. They serve as the main, background, and engine thread requirements.
- Flutter: If you use your mobile phone for a lot of research, games, or surfing, you might have come across the word Flutter in the internet language. The open-source mobile framework uses Dart as its Google programming language, compiled into native code for multiple platforms to deliver near-native user experiences. Above all, Flutter enhances your overall performance and startup time because of its cutting-edge ability to eliminate JavaScript Bridge. Flutter features hot reload, widgets, internalized libraries, and code integration to increase the efficiency of your apps.
- Ionic: Iconic builds cross-platform mobile applications and features hybrid apps using your existing web development technology. In short, a mobile app development company uses single codes to write front-end technologies like CSS, HTML, JavaScript, etc. It has a unique feature based on Apache Cordova that builds the native part of the app.
An ionic framework allows the app to display as a native and Progressive Web App (PWA) in your browser. In addition, it is for people who want to run a single code on various platforms, a web app. However, an Ionic iOS framework will not deliver a seamless experience compared to an Android one.
Differences between Native and Cross-platform Mobile Apps
The question here remains the same, which mobile app development platform should you choose? Earlier, we discussed the types of apps and now we will go through the differences between Native mobile app development and cross-platform app development to answer this.
- Firstly of all, unlike a cross-platform mobile app development company, a native app company performs better in-app responsiveness with the code directly interacting with the device.
- Secondly, the native apps are safer to invest in with a stable framework and tools for long-term projects.
- Native app development delivers amazing visuals with UI components and extraordinary UX with unrestricted access.
- In the case of native apps, they are better in background processing and send push notifications when compared with cross-platform app development.
- Cross-platform doesn’t provide debugging facilities on the same app.
- Comparing cross-platform and native apps, cross-platform takes less time in the development process as they do not need different teams to build various platforms.
- Finally, if you don’t want to spend much on developing an app, then cross-platform should be your choice as it utilizes fewer resources by creating it for multiple platforms.
Conclusion
Native mobile apps are traditional app development types that perform far better than cross-platform mobile apps in delivering high-performance apps with more advantages. Simultaneously, if you think you can perform better with cross-platform, you can select from Flutter and other frameworks. Despite all the benefits, one thing is sure you will not find everything under one app.
