Cross-platform app development has gained prominence for a good reason. Companies can reduce development costs by producing one app across various target platforms while quickly reaching wider audiences.
As most may know, cross-platform technologies like React Native make it possible to build mobile applications for iOS and Android platforms, but did you also know it can also be used to make browser extensions and transform mobile applications onto desktop and online platforms?
Follow this comprehensive React Native guide to create cross-platform apps using React Native easily. At the same time, our GitHub repository hosts all of its code for this setup, allowing you to follow along easily and use it yourself for future projects.
Team leads, and business owners looking to speed up development processes and lower expenses will find this article beneficial. React developers will gain from expanding their cross-platform app development knowledge. Engineers already familiar with React may find learning React Native easy due to its many shared concepts, methods, patterns, and syntax features.
Cross-Platform Development: Pros, Cons, And Use Cases
Software development offers one general rule to follow for maximum customer attraction: make your app compatible with every platform your target market uses - be that online/desktop software, Apple products, or Android handsets - this rule holds regardless of who your target customers may be.
Your team should consist of:
- Kotlin developer for Android
- Swift developer for iOS
- .NET developer for Windows
- JavaScript developer for web
Even when engaging highly qualified specialists, there can still be risks involved with employing such individuals. First, gathering an appropriate group of developers, QA engineers, and project managers with knowledge specific to your project can be quite a task - not to mention costing time and money for companies managing them effectively.
Since you will manage multiple platforms simultaneously, the timeline for launching each product separately may differ. Plus, adding support for more platforms significantly multiplies upgrades, modifications, and maintenance tasks.
Cross-platform development strategies offer one solution to these difficulties when porting programs across several platforms.
Cross-platform development uses particular frameworks with tools, wrappers, and universal technologies that support development on different platforms. Electronic devices in cross-platform development must support different operating systems without disrupting functionality.
Common Examples include:
- JavaScript + HTML + CSS
- React
- C#
- Dart
Because JavaScript is one of the primary technologies utilized within React Native - our topic for this post - we will focus on it here.
Let's first address the advantages and disadvantages of cross-platform app development generally:
- Fast. Developers using cross-platform methodologies can build applications quickly; there's no need to develop separate codebases for every platform.
- Easy to maintain. Cross-platform development simplifies solution maintenance as developers only need to update one codebase instead of multiple ones.
- Consistent user experience. Cross-platform technology enables developers to ensure an ideal user experience across platforms, helping customers remain happy while decreasing churn rates by offering consistent and easy-to-use interfaces across platforms.
- Interchangeable team. Instead of hiring developers with various skill sets individually, assembling a team of JavaScript specialists who can handle everything is often more cost-effective and more accessible to scale as more developers join your team. Thanks to its widespread adoption, hiring additional programmers should be OK, too.
- Cost-efficient.As it can save on costs by hiring and maintaining only one codebase per platform, developing one app across various platforms could potentially result in significant cost savings.
- Wide reach. By employing one codebase to cover multiple platforms and increase potential user numbers.
Let us now review some potential drawbacks and issues associated with cross-platform development:
- Performance. Native technologies tend to be more efficient than cross-platform frameworks as they compile using the programming language and APIs native to each platform, saving both time and processing power for complex apps like video editors or games that use rapid data processing such as games or editors. Conversely, cross-platform frameworks convert code into the platform language, which results in slower data processing speeds, which could impact their functionality significantly.
- Large app size. Even without optimization, even essential cross-platform apps may weigh 80-100MB without being appropriately optimized. On the plus side, customers may easily download these large applications via modern mobile networks; developers now have ways to reduce application sizes significantly.
- Integration issues. As cross-platform technologies don't keep pace with OS updates, they often don't allow access to all of an OS' capabilities; you may have to wait for its creators to incorporate features in an OS update into its framework.
Cross-platform technologies find applications across an array of sectors. Well-known products using them include Dropbox, Slack, Skype, Figma, Airbnb, and Uber - among others.
Cross-platform frameworks like React Native are our go-to choice when developing applications of any sort:
- File system programs like calendars, code editors, notepads, and notes use file systems.
- Client-server applications include chat, messenger, time management systems, password managers, streaming video players, and game clients.
Cross-platform technologies may only sometimes be suitable for some applications and do have certain limits; applications that require extensive graphics processing or client-side computation may not perform optimally in such an environment.
Before selecting this development method, it is vital that we carefully assess our application's requirements.
Let's examine some technologies that enable high-quality goods to offer consistent user experiences across platforms.
Also Read: React Native: The Ultimate Solution for Hybrid App Development? Costing You Thousands!
Top Cross-Platform Technologies And Frameworks
Your developers can build an efficient cross-platform app by employing various technologies. Let's quickly review some of the more well-liked.
Progressive Web Application
Progressive Web Applications (PWAs) are websites designed to replicate native desktop or mobile app features like push notifications, offline access, and hardware access (camera or GPS) on devices through modern web technology. PWAs utilize cutting-edge web services to offer functionalities like push notifications, offline access, and device hardware access (such as cameras or GPS).
WordPress websites can easily be converted to Progressive Web Applications (PWAs), which users can install onto their devices and open as any other app from their home screens.
However, due to Apple's ban on this technology, it is better suited for corporate applications hosted on separate servers.
Hybrid Mobile Apps
Hybrid mobile apps combine web technologies like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript with native app shells to act like traditional native applications and access device-specific functions like GPS navigation, contact management, or camera access. With such support in place, hybrid mobile applications can operate similarly to their counterpart native ones and offer access to GPS, contacts lists, or cameras as needed.
Ionic and Apache Cordova are the two most frequently used frameworks for hybrid apps, making it possible to publish your app to the Google Play Store and the Apple App Store, unlike PWAs.
Flutter
Google developed Flutter as a framework designed for app creation using Dart programming language, thus speeding up compilation times significantly and promising simplicity of programming, widget-based logic, and native performance characteristics.
Programmers can easily tailor flutter programs across any platform imaginable - web, macOS, Linux, Windows, and mobile operating systems, including iOS and Android.
React Native
React Native, developed and supported by Facebook, allows programmers to develop iOS and Android mobile applications using JavaScript quickly. React Native uses components packaged with its program that provide access to device hardware components for cross-platform mobile app development.
React Native is an impressive platform with numerous application development opportunities; let's examine some of them more in-depth here. It enables developers to extend mobile apps beyond browser extensions by building desktop and web applications using React Native technology, providing desktop and web app extensions and browser extensions using this framework.
React Native: Cross-Platform Benefits?
React Native is an open-source framework developed and maintained by Facebook that makes cross-platform mobile applications. React library serves as the cornerstone for React Native web apps.
React Native offers outstanding performance as its native code execution enables seamless operations on iOS and Android devices. By employing this approach, React Native ensures optimal program functions on both platforms, giving users exceptional user experiences.
React Native offers many advantages, one being its active developer community, which continues to refine and extend the framework. You'll be able to solve any issue on the internet quickly.
React Native is an excellent cross-platform app development framework, as it enables programmers to write apps that run across Windows, macOS, iOS, Android, and the web from one codebase. Furthermore, third-party tools and libraries may further extend support.
React Native's most significant advantage lies in its time and financial savings for cross-platform development, offering developers significant time and financial perks in one simple codebase compared to individual code bases for every platform - which means faster development times, more manageable maintenance tasks, consistent user experiences and lower expenses than when having to maintain separate code bases for everyone.
React Native is built upon the well-known React library for online programming, so your web development skills may translate to new projects seamlessly and smoothly. This makes learning React Native much more straightforward for developers already acquainted with it.
Conclusion
Businesses can quickly reach a broad user base while keeping costs to a minimum by taking advantage of cross-platform technologies like React Native. By working with smaller teams on reduced budgets in less development timeframes, cross-platform technologies provide businesses with an effective tool.
This post demonstrated how React Native can be used to develop cross-platform apps with just a single codebase that are adaptable across platforms and user interfaces are consistent and organic on each one. We also showed you how you could modify an app across different platforms so its UI stays the same on each. Contact us as we are the best React Native Development Company.
