The invention and wide-spread adoption of the smart phone has had a seismic impact on society, countless industries, and the ways in which organizations communicate and transact business with their customers. Similar to the rapid evolution brought on by the Internet at the turn of the century, over the past two decades, businesses have had to determine how they will incorporate yet another complex, ubiquitous, and ever-changing technology into the ways they engage with their customers.
To add to this complexity, the industry is comprised of multiple distinct platforms, each with their own unique design language, engineering frameworks, and features. This makes it both difficult and expensive for businesses to build and maintain mobile applications that will reach their customers and drive growth.
To deal with this, in recent years, new technologies and frameworks have leveled this playing field and helped drastically drive down the cost and complexity of mobile app development. We will dive in and talk about the challenges that businesses have historically faced when building mobile applications across multiple platforms and how the industry has stepped-up to provide new ways to get more done with less.
In the before-times…
In the early days of the mobile revolution, there were many players building smart phones and each one had a bespoke set of underlying technology driving their devices. As a result, the number of competing platforms and operating systems was equally as vast. This made it prohibitively expensive for any business to build an app that could reach their customers regardless of what device they were using.
Thankfully, over a fairly short number of years the world largely coalesced around two dominant platforms: Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS. Now, instead of trying to predict which devices would be most prevalent among your particular customer demographic, businesses only needed to be concerned with two. While this greatly simplified the complexities, it still left a number of key challenges in place that many companies had to contend with across these two leading mobile platforms.
Challenges with traditional development in fractured mobile ecosystems…
Easily the top challenge was, and still is, that of cost efficiency. While the industry had largely aligned around these two standardized platforms, they each still relied on a very different underlying set of technologies and development tools. This meant that to develop “native” mobile applications (that is applications written specifically for a single platform) required you to do it twice; once to run on Apple devices and again to run on Android devices.
While some companies early on chose to run with either Apple or Android rather than both, the marketplace quickly made it apparent that this was not a sustainable strategy. So it was gradually accepted that to have the most inclusive and widespread reach, you need to support both.
Opting to build an application for both Apple and Android carries with it a number of challenges and downsides that make it a particularly difficult initiative to get approved and run with. This includes:
- Often you need to hire two distinct teams of engineers, as it is rare to have native expertise in both Android and iOS.
- While similar in many areas, both Apple and Android have sometimes very different design languages and marquee features that their users expect any app to support
- A longer time-to-market to deliver your application and higher ongoing support costs.
- As both Apple and Android have different cadences for releasing new devices and features, it is often difficult to support both simultaneously.
All of this meant that while companies with deeper pockets and more significant development teams were now able to reach customers across both platforms, smaller organizations and start-ups were often still faced with the significant costs associated with supporting both ecosystems.
Dawn of cross-platform mobile frameworks…
It became clear early on that there would be incredible value in having a way to write an application once, and deploy it everywhere. Rather than dealing with different coding languages, tools, compilers, etc. a team of developers would be able to develop their application using a common set of tools and then make use of some sort of translation mechanism to generate the necessary code for platform their application was to run on.
This being no small feat, the primary contenders all came from some of the largest players in the technology world.
- Microsoft brought forth Xamarin, leveraging their own Visual Studio development environment and proprietary C# coding language.
- Facebook, already making a major splash with their web framework React, created React Native, opening the door for developers traditionally experienced in building websites to now play in the mobile development sandbox.
- Google led with Flutter, a cross-platform framework that leveraged their own proprietary coding language, Dart.
While there continue to be others trying to launch their own solutions, these three own most of the developer eyeballs in the industry, though Microsoft is running a distant third to Facebook’s React Native and Google’s Flutter platforms. Today these remain part of the industry standard for cross-platform mobile development as of today.
Benefits of leveraging cross-platform frameworks…
Opting to build your mobile application project using one of these frameworks provides a number of significant financial and logistical benefits that can’t be achieved when developing native applications for each:
- Significant reduction in the cost of development. Write the application once, use it everywhere.
- There is a large pool of engineering talent, as well as agencies, in the marketplace that specialize in this type of cross-platform mobile application development.
- A quicker time-to-market for any new app as well as a faster rate of delivery for new features
- Lower ongoing support and maintenance costs throughout the life the application
Due to these, and other benefits, opting for a cross-platform development approach offers the best return on investment for a vast majority of companies planning to launch their own mobile product.
Challenges of leveraging cross-platform frameworks…
While this cross-platform capability has greatly leveled the field among companies both large and small, there are still some challenges to be aware of when undertaking this approach to your project:
- Apple and Google each have much in common from a user experience perspective. However, they each also have their own subsets of unique requirements, standards, and design language that must be contended with when designing any cross-platform application.
- When integrating with third party partners and services such as payment gateways, user authentication, and marketing tools you may need to develop your own custom middleware if they do not have an existing SDK (software development kit) in the cross-platform language of your choosing.
- Since all of these frameworks essentially translate your code into the appropriate type for each platform, they can often have a lag in supporting the newest features and capabilities launched by Apple and Google. Thus, you may need to wait to take advantage of the hot new features that everyone is talking about.
However, as these platforms have grown and matured, many of these issues are becoming significantly less of an obstacle as they continue to refine the ways they work with both the Apple and Android ecosystems.
Choosing the right framework for your project
Whether you are planning to develop your cross-platform mobile project in-house or leverage an external agency partner, you will want to make sure you choose the right framework for your needs. Primarily this will be a concern for those choosing to develop internally.
The single most important factor is generally what your existing development team has the most experience in. Are you a Microsoft shop? Then you should likely consider Xamarin (now called Maui). Are your developers primarily skilled in developing experiences for the web? Then React Native is likely the right choice for you. Finally, if your existing team is comfortable with Java or Kotlin, then Flutter is likely the correct path.
Additionally, you will want to consider the type of application you are developing. Will it require high-end graphics and animations that are likely to tax your users’ devices? Will you be integrating with external devices via BLE (Bluetooth low energy) or some other network technology? Or, are you building a simple e-commerce application?
Each of the three platforms above each has their own sets of strengths and weaknesses. However, at the end of the day any of them will likely lead to success and, as time has gone on, they are each getting closer together in terms of performance and features.
Setting up your cross-platform mobile app project for success
Regardless of which approach you ultimately choose, you will want to make sure you set yourself up for success early on. This requires a number of key strategies early on in the process:
- Most significantly, make sure that your application design is setup to provide an amazing user experience that feels at home on either Apple or Android devices. Some things to consider:
- Prioritize a consistent UI/UX across all platforms to ensure a seamless user experience
- Design for various screen sizes and resolutions to accommodate the wide range of devices in the market.
- If possible, consider leveraging a design system to help maintain consistency and efficiency
- Focus on optimizing for performance, early on.
- Address any performance bottlenecks as early as possible in the development process.
- Leverage cloud services for heavy business logic and high-intensity compute workloads, as opposed to relying on the devices underlying power.
- As with any project, be sure to implement a robust testing strategy early on and through the lifecycle of the application’s development.
How can Moxie help?
At Moxie Labs, we know our way around cross-platform mobile apps. Our UX team has years of experience partnering with clients to create experiences your customers will love, and keep coming back to. Our engineers geek out over building fast, dynamic apps that feel right at home on any device.
Have a cross-platform project in mind? Let’s talk.
