The modern app development market is fast-paced and that is motivating developers around the world to speed up the development and deployment process of new apps. Now when over 5 billion smartphone users are existing across the globe, there is a cutthroat competition that every industry is facing whether we talk about the healthcare industry, financial services, blockchain, or more.
To satisfy the rising competition, several digital technology trends are being used in the current market and cross-platform app development is one of such viral tech trends. The cross-platform development trend is saving people’s time, motivating them to build more apps, and making the development process less stressful. To know how let’s discuss a few highlights of the development process.
What is cross-platform app development?
Cross-platform app development, as the name suggests, is a practice of targeting more than one platform to release your smartphone app. There are several app development frameworks available in the market such as Flutter, React Native, Unity, Xamarin, Iconic, etc to help developers build these cross-platform apps faster. According to a Statista report, Flutter lead the market with 46% of the market share in 2022 while React Native in 2019 had the largest grab on the in 2019 and 2020 both.
Advantages of the cross-platform development approach
There are several reasons why custom software development companies love the cross-platform development approach and saving time is just a fraction of these advantages. Let us take you through a few crucial advantages of the cross-platform development approach further!
1. Ability to reuse the app code
The major advantage of building a cross-platform application is the ability to reuse the code for all platforms where you want to deploy your app. Developers can write the app code once and deploy it on targeted platforms at once to save their time, money, and other resources. The reusability of code also makes it easier to locate bugs or to maintain the app in the future.
2. Faster debugging and maintenance
As mentioned above, the single codebase makes it easier to locate bugs or glitches caused by codes. Instead of having to go through the code to find bugs for each platform and to fix them repeatedly, you can simply go through the app code once, fix it, test it, and update it. So, you are saving money even after the development and deployment of the app while your revenues are not impacted at all if you are quickly locating and fixing bugs before your target users are even bothered by them.
3. Consistency of the user experience
Another amazing advantage of cross-platform apps is that you get to maintain a consistent user experience across all platforms wherever you launch your app. The consistent user experience helps app users adapt to your app easily whenever they change their devices. Also, to maintain brand consistency, this feature is super useful as well.
4. Expanded market reach
The market reach is easier to expand when you own an app that can run on any targeted platform. The cross-platform app can help you optimize your app marketing strategy and target multiple user groups in parallel. This helps app owners market a single app instead of having to market apps individually. They can well optimize their SEO and other such marketing efforts by focusing on a single product and reducing the resources required for their marketing activities.
5. Huge community support
There are several cross-platform app development frameworks existing in the market and thanks to them, a huge community of cross-platform developers has been created. This helps developers get their queries resolved quickly, find resources required for their app development projects, get the required teams of skilled developers, and more. The huge community of developers also contributes in developing features, visual elements, UX components, etc for cross-platform developers to use so they can build apps faster than usual.
6. Extensive ability to sync
As cross-platform apps are built and deployed using a single codebase, every data updated on these apps is easily accessible across all targeted devices. App users can simply log in to their accounts and access the app data. This ability makes it easier for app users to resume their app usage journey from where they left off.
Wrapping up
Cross-platform development has several advantages and going through them makes it clear why this app development trend is super popular across several industries. To meet the demand of the rising digital market, these apps are surely going to witness expanding popularity in the future as well as they are fast to build and fast to deploy. So, for a super dynamic market, there is no better alternative. And if you own a small business or a startup and looking forward to building a permanent reputation in the current market, you can leverage the cross-platform app development practice for the same as well.