Custom Software Apps & SharePoint Consulting

How to Select the Best Mobile App Development Platform

Selecting the platform for your next mobile app development project is not straight-forward. There are a variety of valid approaches each with its own trade-offs. Furthermore, no single approach has yet to establish itself as the overwhelming choice in the industry.

There are three main paths down which your development team could go:

  1. Hybrid application development
  2. Cross-compilation
  3. Native development

The hybrid application development approach leverages the latest in web development technologies, led by HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript, to develop applications that seamlessly work across a wide swath of mobile devices. These applications are deployed in a native app “container” so that the user experience is equivalent to a fully native app. Advances in modern web browser technology, such as local storage, enable web apps that can truly replace native apps – all while providing the end user a native app experience that they cannot distinguish from a true native app. Gartner also agrees that this approach leads the way as the best forward-looking approach:

Today, hybrid application development tools are the best option for midmarket organizations that have to operate within specific financial and resource bounds. These hybrid tools enable application teams to leverage existing Web skills and components. They also provide the widest deployment across devices. Native development tools should be the last choice for midmarket organizations today because of higher development costs.

Gartner, Critical Inflection Points for Modmarket Mobility Initiatives (July 2014)

Cross-compilation ranks as a strong second place choice among mobile development options. Frameworks such as Xamarin give your team the ability to write code once while compiling to multiple native apps. This is a valid approach if you must have a native app product. However, it is important to realize that the 80/20 rule tends to apply here – you may write 80% of the code generically across devices but still need to write 20% of the code as device-specific implementations. Do not assume that you will get 100% of what need for all devices with just your write-once generic code.

Native development, while still very popular today, does not leverage the advances provided by either hybrid app development or cross-compilation tools. As Gartner notes, this leads to higher development costs in the long term as you are forced to implement the same things multiple times to get them to market on all desired devices. Duplication of code always increases maintenance costs over time.

At Entrance, we believe strongly that the future of mobile development is in hybrid applications.

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