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DA1. Future of Cross-Platform Mobile Development

Statement

Do you think that cross-platform mobile development will have an impact on native development or native developers?

Solution

The time to the market is of the essence, and with the increasing number of mobile devices and their capabilities; even the low-end devices nowadays have more power than best devices ten years ago; with all of this, it is important to be able to produce a working platform-independent app as soon as possible for the business to survive.

Native development requires writing code in a platform specific language (Kotlin/Java for Android, Swift for IOS), assembling different teams for each platform, maintaining and communicating between teams and platforms, and the list goes on. All of this is an overhead before crafting business logic and UI.

On the other hand, Native development produces the more performant apps, consistent in look and feel with underlying platform, and better integration with platform specific features.

The cross-platform development requires smaller and more business-focused teams, where the code is written in a single language (e.g. JavaScript) and then automated tools are used to generate native code for each platform, and the entire packaging/distribution/monitoring process is automated as well.

The down sides of cross-platform development are that the apps are not as performant as native apps but the difference is rarely noticeable nowadays; and generated code has its limitation accessing the platform native features.

There are various approached to cross platform development that does not including using a framework, by keeping the native layer as then and share most assets/business logic between platforms. Or, using Hybrid apps, where the app itself is a web app running on a native container (WebView) especially with the latest advancements in web APIs that allow access to platform specific features (Tabor & Vrdoljak, 2019).

Personally, I used React Native to develop a cross-platform App, only one person in the team had a native development experience, and yet we managed to produce a professional app that is being used by thousands of users each month. So I think that cross-platform will have a huge impact on native development, where few people need to be experts in native development and the rest of the team can focus on the business logic and UI.

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