Native Vs Cross-Platform Mobile Application Development

With a rise in the need for software developers, even in 2022, more and more people are getting into tech because of the opportunities it offers, and mobile application development is not left out of the trends. But are you ready for this trend ?

When it comes to developing websites, it’s almost straight forward, as you need to either use Web Technologies like React or Angular for the front end and some Backend Frameworks like Express and Node Js or PHP and Laravel, etc, and it is must to use some HTML, CSS and JavaScript / Typescript in your Web development projects. But when it comes down to Mobile Application Development, people get confused on the various options out there.

Although, its almost the same with Web development ( the confusion ), few people might not understand the pros and cons of doing either Native or Cross-Platform mobile application development.

Native Application Development

When starting out Mobile application development myself, I also wondered which one I should go for — Native or Cross-Platform, and because I had little help and advise back then, I decided to go with Native. After a few months using the Android SDK and Java to develop my apps, I discover that some things are just so tedious when you try to implement them, but I also saw how the the learning the curve to go the Native route was not as steep as that of the Cross-Platform alternative. So let me outline the pros and cons that I discovered while building Native applications.

Pros

1. It is much more straightforward and easier to get into as a beginner : With Android development, you use either Java or Kotlin as the core programming language alongside the Android SDK and other tools (as I like to call them) like SQLite and XML to build a reasonable application. For IOS development, you use either Objective-C or swift with the IOS SDK. But Google and Apple recommends using Kotlin and Swift respectively, to develop modern apps.
2. Native application development platforms includes almost everything you need to develop an app : Actually, they come with everything you need, the only time you might want something outside what was provided for you, is when you might need to use external libraries ( which you can also do yourself, if you have the time to do it ).
3. Both Google and Apple have good IDEs used for mobile development, you have Android Studio for Android and XCode for IOS: When you are a native application developer, you just need to download these software programs, the SDK and platform tools and you are ready to build your apps.
4. Performance of your apps are optimal: You don’t need to worry about performance when you build apps that are fully offline like games as both platforms are best for them, although, you might not want to build games from scratch using them because you would just be re-inventing the wheel. Game developers use game engines like Unity and Unreal engine to develop their games.
5. The app package sizes are not huge.

Cons

1. Its very tedious building native apps: Everything you just do in it, is just so stressful and need a very good understanding of the underlying OS ; Android or IOS before you can build a reasonable application that won’t be rejected on Google’s Play store and The App store.
2. Time-to-market is increased: One of the reason this is true is that, for example, Google releases a new Android version every 6 months and there might be very huge changes to the API developers use, and for native apps to work on every version up till the latest release they might need to update the app’s codebase.
3. Native apps works on a particular target platform: With the rapid increase of Android users, more and more mobile applications are being used, businesses don’t just websites, they also build mobile apps that their customers can also use on their mobile phones. But the problem remains; not every mobile phone runs Android OS on it. IOS is the OS that runs on iPhones and iPads, and those businesses would like to increase their customers so they build a second app, but still the same, that works on IOS.
4. Codebase for Native apps are different: It is totally impossible to build Android apps that run on Android built using Java or Kotlin, so IOS apps are built with either Objective-C or Swift, meaning that there would probably be be different teams working on the same apps but on different OS; Android and IOS.
5. Developing native apps are costly: Because of the different teams that work on the same app, companies might need to hire more developers to do the work, which means more money.

Cross platform application development

Cross platform apps are famous as they are the future for modern mobile application development.

More and more native application developers have started building cross platform developers have begun using tools and frameworks like React native, Flutter and Ionic to build Cross-Platform apps that run on both Android and IOS. Flutter development uses dart as its primary programming language and even comes with its own package manager and React native uses JavaScript or other flavors of JavaScript like Typescript ( which is obviously what you might want to use instead of pure JavaScript ).

Pros

1. Apps can be packaged for both Android and IOS, thus, saving time used in building separate apps that would work on both Android and IOS.
2. Cross platform framework like React Native uses JavaScript (or any other flavor of JavaScript like Typescript) as its primary programming language. JavaScript has a very large community behind the language and a lot of JavaScript libraries have already been built, so that you can speed up your development.
3. Cross platform framework like flutter using dart is a compiled language and therefore is very suitable for speedy development.
4. Reduced cost: The major problem with native application development is its costly development process; two different teams working on a same app, different codebase, but still trying to implement same features on both Android and IOS. Because of the difference in programming language, the two teams can’t re-use each others code. In cross platform native application development, a single team works on both Android and IOS reducing cost in hiring more developers. Time to ship the two releases is reduced because of this.

Cons

1. App size can be larger than normal native apps.
2. Cross platform apps are slower than native apps, therefore, when performance is a pressing matter, it shouldn’t be used. There are also means to speed up performance of cross platform apps, but it would never be as fast as native applications
3. Increase in time to update app to implement latest features: In native mobile application development, latest release of SDK are released so that the developers can start implementing those features, so that their applications don’t break on newer versions on the OS. In cross platform development, developers wait for it to first be implemented on those frameworks to work on both OS before they can then implement those features.
4. Some cross platform apps still rely on some native features to work fully, implementing them might be cumbersome, so developers rely on Third party libraries.

Conclusion

While choosing what to use to develop your apps depend on time, money and performance mostly. So every developer needs to know what are the requirements of the apps they build, before making a choice.

Keep on coding, Thanks for reading 🙂