Native or Cross-platform App Development?

According to Statista, in 2020 users downloaded 218 billion mobile apps. Moreover, in 2023, mobile apps are projected to generate more than 935 billion U.S. dollars in revenues via paid downloads and in-app advertising. With such an ever-growing market, most companies want quality, reliable applications that are also easy to update and maintain. But in fact, there is always the main question: native or cross-platform app development. In this article, we’ll tell you the difference between native and cross-platform apps, and try to figure out if native apps are better than cross-platform ones.

Pros and cons of native apps

Native applications are developed for a specific operating system (Android, iOS). Such mobile app development requires a development team that has specific knowledge and programming skills for each operating system and development environment. For example, for iOS, the development is done with C++/Swift in the Xcode development environment, and for Android — with Java in the Eclipse development environment.

Native applications provide fast and high-quality interaction with the operating system, as they are tailored to the specifics of each system. Another important advantage of native apps is security. Fraudsters can’t access the data in a native app without having the necessary rights. For some companies, security is a priority, so this advantage has a great impact when a business decides what to choose: native or cross-platform app development.

The list of advantages of native apps doesn’t end there. If you develop a native app, you’ll end up with powerful functionality: a wide application menu, a variety of special effects, and interesting animations. The undeniable advantage of a native mobile application is that it can use all the functions of an operating system to the maximum — video and audio player, microphone, voice recorder, etc. Let’s take a look at the main pros and cons of native apps.

Pros and cons of cross-platform apps

Cross-platform applications are developed on the same platform, but they run on all operating systems (Android, iOS). This development approach reduces the capabilities of the application but has an advantage in terms of time and cost of development.

Today, most cross-platform applications are developed using PhoneGap, Xamarin, Titanium, Ionic, Flutter, React Native frameworks. Titanium and PhoneGap are very popular and allow developers to use HTML-CSS-JS combination to create applications and get access to geolocation, sound, and other device features.

However, despite their attractiveness in terms of price and development speed, cross-platform apps have many weaknesses and cannot always reach the level of native ones. They tend to be less flexible, harder to maintain, and less user-friendly because they don’t take into account the uniqueness of each platform. In any case, before choosing this type of mobile application development, it is worth discovering the full list of pros and cons of cross-platform apps.

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