CROSS-PLATFORM MOBILE APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT
While the use of smartphones and tablets has become widespread, whether for a personal or professional use, it is important, for the companies that wish to develop their own applications, to take the users’ habits into account, including the fragmentation of technologies.
Thus, for a mobile application to become compatible with different operating systems, hybrid development can be useful to enable proper support of the application on different devices (smartphone, tablet…) as well as on different platforms (Apple iOS, Android, Windows Phone, Blackberry…)
Two approaches are possible within the development framework of a cross-platform mobile application:
- Developing the application several times, on each one of the native environments.
- Developing the application once with one unique language, for example, by using a development environment that enables the creation, compilation and deployment of a Web application for each mobile system.
Each solution has advantages and disadvantages and can have an impact on the user experience.
NATIVE DEVELOPMENT
Each native mobile application development uses the languages and tools peculiar to each platform, which is a token of quality compared to hybrid approaches.
The advantage of this method is the possibility of completely customizing the application, but also of accessing features and characteristics of each system more accurately, including the hardware layer.
However, this type of development does not allow code sharing between the different targeted platforms, which consequently implies an increase in the volume of work, of the required skills and, therefore, of the cost.
Indeed, the different platforms use completely different development technologies and environments: Java for Android, Swift for Apple iOS and .Net for Windows Phone.
HYBRID DEVELOPMENT
Generally based on JavaScript, HTML5, CSS, the hybrid application principle is to display the occupation code within a WebView, hosted itself in a native application called container.
Despite lower performances in comparison to native applications and the absence of certain features, hybrid applications are relatively successful thanks to their low cost of entry and large development rationalization. Indeed, this type of development is the best way to save money, as the development is completed once and for all, but can be deployed several times across the different platforms.
Please note that hybrid applications often have a similar user interface, as they also use HTML5technology.
CHOOSING BETWEEN NATIVE OR HYBRID DEVELOPMENT
InfoStyle helps you make the best choice according to your budget and your prerequisites, in an unbiased fashion.
Before the project is implemented, we help you make sure that your mobile application project is viable:
- definition of the targetaudience
- competitive research
- analysis of the feasibility and costs
- choosing the platform(s) and the development mode according to your criteria
- definition of the business model
During the development of your cross-platform mobile application, we help you with:
- the programming of the application and the management of potential touch screens
- the porting of the application on the different types of platforms
- the porting and simulliation tests
- the publicationof appcations developed on the App Store and the Android Market
- the technical support and maintenance of the application
