Have you ever lost your network coverage while traveling and still wanted to listen to your favorite playlist? Imagine how lucky you would feel when you realized you have Spotify on your mobile, letting you play your chosen albums, songs, and podcasts. Spotify is a native app, and its offline functionality is one of its biggest advantages.
So, choosing between native or cross-platform development is one of the most essential tasks for any mobile app development project. This choice will have a huge impact on the app design, technologies, and user accessibility.
The blog will guide you through your journey of deciding whether to choose native app development or cross-platform development. So let us understand.
Native App Development
The process of creating mobile apps for specific platforms, such as iOS or Android, is known as native app development. Developers must use platform-specific languages to develop native applications. Python, Kotlin, and Java are used in the development of Android apps. Objective-C and Swift are among the languages used for the iOS mobile operating system. Examples of well-known native mobile apps are Google Maps, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and WhatsApp.
Pros of Native App Development
Higher Performance
Native app codes value direct access to the host’s operating system and features since native apps are platform-specific. The app’s efficiency is improved by seamless interaction with its native capabilities, mainly when providing images and multimedia information. This will enhance the speed of the mobile app by lowering the possibility of downtime due to crashes or freezes. Compared to their cross-platform competitors, native apps frequently have the advantage of being smaller, which can lead to quicker application store downloads. Users with limited storage capacity on their devices or those sensitive about data usage may significantly benefit from this feature.
Stability in Maintenance and Updates
There is great faith and confidence that these digital behemoths will continue to support and improve their mobile operating systems because Android and iOS are developed by Google and Apple, respectively. Having access to SDKs allows developers to access the most recent features directly and expedites the development process. From a practical standpoint, this implies that natively developed apps for iOS and Android are stable in terms of upgrades and maintenance. When new features are released, they can be used immediately.
UI/UX and Features Customization
Harnessing Full-Hardware Functionality
Because native apps are developed directly using platform-specific APIs, they are frequently seen as better at utilizing a mobile device’s hardware features, such as the camera and GPS. This allows them to swiftly incorporate the newest hardware feature improvements. However, this perspective falls short of capturing the full potential of cross-platform applications. The benefit of native apps is that they may instantly integrate updates that align with their platforms.
App Security
File encryption, sophisticated fraud detection, and other security features are typically simpler for native app developers to implement using the frameworks and resources available on each platform. In addition, because it’s harder to forecast when cross-platform frameworks will be updated in response to patches and other platform-specific releases, native apps update their security features faster than cross-platform apps.
Better Positioning on App Stores
Native apps rank higher in the App Store because of their superior performance and user-friendly features. In the gaming segment, where native is still the preferred option, it is particularly evident.
Cons of Native App Development
Costlier and Time Consuming
As you may know, having two teams develop identical software for iOS and Android costs more money. Additionally, even though the teams operate concurrently, their cooperation to harmonize the UI/UX typically results in longer development cycles.
No Code Reusability
Your engineering teams will have to write independently if you create distinct native apps because you won’t be able to reuse code from one OS to another. Creating distinct native apps takes more time, money, and effort than creating cross-platform apps with reusable codebases.
More Support and Maintenance
The fact that native apps would cost more to maintain is another major drawback. The fact that app expenses continue after an application is deployed is something that many firms fail to consider. Actually, the majority of the work is frequently completed during the support and maintenance stage.
Cross-platform App Development
Pros of cross-platform app development
The development strategy that best suits your goals and situation is more critical than one is superior. These are the benefits and drawbacks of developing on several platforms.
Code reusability between Android and iOS apps
One of the main advantages of cross-platform development for most developers is the possibility of constructing a single codebase for both iOS and Android apps. Code for several platforms must be written independently for native applications, usually by two different teams or engineers. Because the development team can work on multiple platforms simultaneously, the complete codebase is preserved in one location while creating custom mobile apps, which helps save time and effort.
Faster development process
Cross-platform app development uses a single development approach to create an app that works on several platforms. Due to code reusability between platforms, businesses no longer need to create distinct Android and iOS projects. The product, design, and engineering teams are all working on the same project, which significantly speeds up development operationally.
Reduced development cost
Building cross-platform apps could be up to 30% less expensive than creating iOS and Android apps separately since just one development team is required rather than at least two. Additionally, developers can leverage a significant amount of code and other assets between online and mobile platforms to use technologies that can create web and mobile apps (like React Native). This can lower development costs by speeding up the process.
UI/UX consistency
Cons of Cross-platfrom app development
Bigger digital footprint
Generally speaking, cross-platform apps are bigger. You should be aware of the different alternatives for mobile optimization.
Difficulty in integrations
Not all platform-specific features are integrated by cross-platform frameworks. Specific hardware-specific integrations, such as the use of GPUs, may require native app development expertise.
Lower performance
To run your application, cross-platform frameworks typically include a bespoke runtime. Interaction with platform-specific services is its responsibility. Performance may suffer as a result of this additional layer of computing.
Delayed platform features
Updates and new features are usually included in new SDK versions. You must wait for an additional upgrade to use these more recent features with cross-platform frameworks.
Head-to-Head Comparison Between Native and Cross-platform App Development
| Features | Native App Development | Cross-platform App Development |
|---|---|---|
|
Development Time |
Slow |
Fast |
|
App Performance |
Seamless |
Some performance issues may come |
|
User Experience |
Much better |
Normal |
|
Technology Stack |
Kotlin, Swift |
Flutter, React Native, Xamarin |
|
Hiring Developers |
More Availability |
Low Availability |
|
App Updates |
Time-consuming |
Time-saving |
|
Offline Access |
Can be accessed without internet |
Can be accessed through internet |
|
Cost-Saving |
Not much |
Yes |
Which One Should You Choose For Your Next Project?
Selecting one development strategy over another is rarely an easy choice. Every project has a distinct set of conditions and varying priorities. Here is a summary of important factors to help you select based on various factors.
Cross-platform app development works better for:
- A quicker time to market
- Reducing or eliminating development expenses
- Reduced effort and costs associated with app maintenance
- Reusability of code across Android and iOS
- For lighter apps that are not GPU-intensive and have a heavy intimation
- Need of interface consistency and navigation across different platforms
- For idea testing, prototype, and hypothesis
Native app development works better for:
- App performance and speed
- App security
- Customizability and configuration of features
- Apps that have platform-specific UI/UX
- Quick and easy deployment of updates and new features
- To build a responsive application
- For resource intensive-apps
Conclusion
You must decide the operating system or systems you want your application to work with to develop a successful, reliable, and well-received mobile application. When creating your mobile application, consider the tools, techniques, advantages, and disadvantages of each approach, even if you can utilize native and cross-platform development approaches for the Android and iOS operating systems.
