If you’re planning to invest in mobile app development, you must have come across this confusion around choosing a cross platform of native development. While native apps offer better design features and performance, cross-platform remains on top for cost-effectiveness and quicker time-to-market. However, as you read further – you’ll get to know that cross-platform resolves most of the performance issues it is said to not handle.
So, what should you choose between native and cross-platform? What factors play a role in making this decision? Does the ability to launch across multiple platforms at a time impact load speed? Is the cost-cutting worth those rising potential risks?
In this article, we’ll explore both development types, highlight their advantages and disadvantages, and come up with which platform should you choose to launch a successful application.
What Is Native App Development?
Before you dive into the comparison, you must know what native development actually is. Native development is basically building custom mobile apps for a particular operating system such as, IOS and Android. It allows developers to integrate platform-specific features and functionalities – ensuring a seamless user experience.
Since everything worthy comes at a price, native app development is no doubt effective and seamless – it costs you more in comparison to cross-platform development.
Native apps are developed using languages and frameworks that are platform-specific. As an outcome, these offer premium user experience, excellent load times, and optimal performances. The standard framework used by anios app development company in USA is Swift while those focused at android app development leverages Kotlin.
Due to the heavy costs involved, native app development is often only used for businesses that majorly depend on premium user experience and app performance. For example, a video editing application particularly requires seamless performance.
Some of the commonly used native apps include Spotify, WhatsApp and UberEats. Since these apps require access to hardware features such as, camera and geolocation – native development helps them handle heavier loads of traffic and computing without hassle.
Advantages of Native App Development
While we’re at it, let’s also look at the great benefits native app development brings along –
Enhances App Performance – whenever there’s a debate between native and cross-platform development, enhanced app performance always makes native the top choice. Data-heavy and complex applications actually perform really well with native. However, the difference is becoming almost negligible with cross-platform becoming advanced over time.
While modern tools such as React Native and Flutter help building efficient cross-platform apps, native can be the best choice when you’re building a digital solution with advanced animations. Smaller in size and code, native apps offer premium experiences with faster downloads and load times.
Increased Maintenance Stability – native app development majorly increases the security and stability of a system by letting the developer’s access platform updates in time. Though updates can also be implemented on cross-platform, the upgrade is always quicker with native apps. Both IOS and Android offer developers with respective SDKs so that they can build apps with enhanced security and efficiency.
Seamless User Experience – although cross-platform apps can also deliver an immersing user experience, native apps certainly have more options to impress the users. With hassle-free access to all the native features and functionalities – native app development can guarantee a seamless user experience. It allows users to access AR/VR tools, hardware features and other factors that can improve user experience to some incredible extent.
Significantly, while cross-platform development offers uniform experiences across all apps, native development brings room for unstoppable creativity and customization.
Maximized Scalability – your choice between native and cross-platform development also influences the app’s scalability. Built to handle a specific platform, native apps are usually easier to be either expanded or shrunk on the basis of business needs. For example, features such as effective memory management and background processing helps building apps that can tackle complex computations and larger datasets.
Finely-tuned Customization – while cross-platform app development does allow customization to a greater extent, native apps can be quickly customized leveraging the preset components of the user-interface. Though cross-platform is advancing each passing day, making customizations easier – native apps are considered better when it comes to personalization.
Disadvantages of Native App Development
Though native app development seems like the perfect choice, it does come along with some drawbacks at the same time. They include –
Increased Resources – be it human resources, time or cost – native app development requires more in comparison to cross-platform. Building two individual apps for each different platform clearly takes up more time, costs more investment, and requires excessive development efforts meaning more human resources involved.
Requires Strict Compliance – building two native apps requires a strong compliance and alignment between the android and ios teams, leading to a more complex and longer development cycle. The inability of using a similar code across different platforms enforces developers to build two different codes, slowing down the overall process of development even further.
Increased Maintenance Efforts – though native apps have more stability, their maintenance requires more effort – mainly because two different apps needs to be updated and maintained individually. As an outcome, not just the cost of development is increased but the post-launch expenses also maximize.
What Is Cross –Platform App Development?
Cross-platform app development can be referred to building a single codebase that can be deployed across multiple mobile platforms such as, android and ios. Leveraging the modern cross-platform development frameworks and SDKs, developers can create a unified source code which can be seamlessly integrated for both systems. The commonly used frameworks for cross-platform frameworks include Flutter, Kotlin Multiplatform, React Native, .Net and many more.
The inherent ability of cross-platform development to reuse the codes allow business to easily reallocate resources. Instead of hiring and investing heavily into an individual mobile app development company New York for each ios and android, you can hire a trusted cross-platform development service and build a reliable application that works across both the popular mobile platforms. It helps save excessive costs and minimize the time-to-market.
Some of the mainstream cross-platform apps include Slack, Discord, and Duolingo.
Advantages of Cross-Platform Development
Wondering why you should choose cross-platform over native development in any case? Well, here’s the list of advantages you’ll get:
Reusable Code – the most important and praised feature of cross-platform development is the reusability of source code. Unlike native, you do not have to invest time, resources, and budget on building two different codes. Instead, a unified code can be built and deployed across IOS and Android hassle-free.
It helps foster seamless UI/UX design – displaying similar functionality and interface across both systems. As an outcome, the updates are simplified allowing developers to launch newer features and patches faster.
Time and Cost Effective – though cross-platform is not cheap, it certainly saves up to 30% when compared to native app development. The very fact that cross-platform allows you to deploy a single code across multiple mobile systems saves major cost, time and resources involved in the development cycle. The reusability of code also lets you launch quicker, earning major competitive advantage in the saturated business market.
Guaranteed Consistency – contrary to native development which requires two different teams of developers, cross-platform mobile apps can be built by a single development team – guaranteeing maximum safety. Apart from saving excessive costs, it also lets you preserve the consistency of app functionality, design, and updates.
Easy Testing – testing your app ideas or hypothesis can be difficult with native app development, cross-platform makes it easier. It is an affordable, time-effective development method that allows businesses to build prototypes and MVPs without any heavy investment. Also, cross-platform allows you to expand and scale your MVPs as the business grows without much hassle.
Maximum Audience Reach – the fact that cross-platform apps can reach a wider audience can never be ignored. Unlike natives, it has the potential to attract an audience using both android and ios mobile systems. More reach means more users – eventually maximizing your reach and ROI.
Disadvantages of Cross-Platform App Development
Here’s the list of some cons cross-platform apps come along with:
Low App Performance – given that cross-platform apps have a single codebase deployed across multiple platforms, they require a certain level of tweaking to perform well with the different operating systems, devices, and platforms. It often requires hiring native developers for each platform so that they can look at and fix the individual differences effectively.
These additional steps require an extra layer that can interpret the codebase into platform-specific instructions – ultimately negatively impact the app performance. However, it is important to mention that the modern cross-platform technologies are working on these performance discrepancies and minimizing them to a greater extent.
Limited Capabilities – another core disadvantage of cross-platform apps is their inaccessibility to the native APIs. Modern frameworks do not allow complete access of the native APIs – restricting the functionality and custom plugin requirements of a mobile application.
Slower Updates – cross-platform applications get slower access to the updates – impacting their security and scalability in the long term. While this doesn’t mean you cannot launch newer features or patches. In fact, cross-platform development makes that easier and quicker with a unified codebase.
Cross-Platform vs. Native App Development – A Quick Comparison
| Criteria | Native App Development | Cross-Platform App Development |
| Definition | Building custom apps for specified platforms such as, IOS and Android. | Building unified source codes that can be deployed across multiple platforms like IOS and Android. |
| Languages & Frameworks | Swift (iOS), Kotlin (Android) | Flutter, Kotlin Multiplatform, React Native, .NET, etc. |
| Performance | High performance, small-sized apps with faster load times. Best for complex, animation-heavy solutions. | Low-performance apps due to abstraction layers. Ideal for generic business but might lag with heavy computation. |
| Customization | Highly responsive, fine-tuned apps with easy access to native UI components. | Limited customization depending on the availability of plugin support and framework capability. |
| User Experience | Seamless user-interface with full access to native features such as, geolocation, AR/VR, and camera. | Uniform user-experience but may lack native feature integration. |
| Scalability | Highly scalable, support memory management and simplifies background processing. | Scalable but very limited framework support and performance issues. |
| Security and Stability | Enhanced with timely access to platform-specific updates and SDK improvements. | Decent but may lag in adopting platform-specific updates, affecting long-term stability. |
| Development Time & Cost | Expensive and time-consuming as separate apps are built for each platform. | Cost-effective and faster due to reusable codebase and shared resources. |
| Maintenance | Requires more effort; each app needs separate updates and fixes. | Easier and cheaper maintenance with unified codebase updates. |
| Team Requirement | Two separate teams (iOS and Android) needed, increasing resources. | One team can manage both platforms, reducing manpower needs. |
| Use Cases | Apps needing top-tier performance and native hardware access (e.g., Spotify, WhatsApp, UberEats). | Apps targeting wide reach with budget and time constraints (e.g., Slack, Discord, Duolingo). |
| Market Reach | Limited to a single platform unless built separately. | Maximizes reach by targeting both IOS and Android users at once. |
The Final Verdict: Choosing Between Cross-Platform vs. Native App Development
The above discussion and comparison must have made the choice easier on your end. While both cross-platform and native app development has their pros and cons – you can always pick one on the basis of your business needs, target audience, and estimated budget. For faster, cost-efficient development – cross-platform works the best while native is effective for more reliable, high-performance applications. The core tip here is – to stay flexible and adaptive to the latest advancements in technologies. The more you stay adaptive, the more reliant and successful would be your mobile application in the business landscape.
