Thursday 28 January 2016

Best Cross Platform Mobile Application Development Tools

Cross platform mobile app development involves writing a single codebase for mobile apps that will be used for distinct operating systems. The leading OSs such as Android or iOS are architecturally different. As a result, developers have to spend way too much time and efforts to build apps that will work across these operating systems. Apple and Google both prefer code that has been written differently, further complicating things for programmers who want to write a single codebase that works on both platforms. Not being able to do so leads to duplication of efforts as code has to be tweaked for each platform.



On the other hand, the mobile app market is increasingly moving towards cross-platform apps. This is great for enterprises who want to extend their brand to large number of users through their apps. Fortunately, a number of tools can aid in development of such hybrid apps. Here's a list of the most popular ones in the market today:

Xamarin

Developer experience and industry research indicates that Xamarin enjoys the most popularity and is one of the widely used cross-platform development frameworks. It has a large number of features that makes mobile app development efficient and easy. In particular, Xamarin is favored for large scale projects that require many complex functions. Apart from facilitating app development, Xamarin also lets developers fix bugs as well as test apps in the cloud. Mobile app testing can be conducted on 1000+ devices. It is these attributes that make it top choice for organizations such as Microsoft, IBM and Dow Jones.

Appcelerator Titanium

Enterprise can also opt for Titanium mobile application development. It uses web technology to provide cross-platform compatibility between platforms. The way Appcelerator works is – native apps are derived with the help of technologies like JavaScript, CSS3, HTML5 and PHP. They are then provided on mobiles via browsers. The platform is highly efficient and users gets access to 300+ APIs. Apart from this, developers who have access to the right resources will find it very easy to learn Titanium.

PhoneGap

PhoneGap is another multi-platform popular framework with a set of powerful and rich features. It is based on the open-source Apache Cordova project and is currently free to use. Since it is compatible with the most popular mobile platforms, PhoneGap developers can build apps with a native shell/wrapper for every platform that your business targets. Additionally, it has a short learning curve so app development doesn't take a lot of time and is fairly easy to accomplish.

Thus, cross-platform mobile app development is the best alternative in today's environment. Organizations who want to prevent native development costs can utilize any of the tools above to build mobile apps that offer native look and performance without the associated expenses.

What cross-platform tools have you used for mobile app development? Let us know in the comments below. We’d love to hear from you, and thanks for reading!

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