3 Best Cross-Platform Alternatives For Enterprise Mobile App Development
The existence of numerous tools, technologies, and approaches for mobile app development has made it difficult for enterprises and developers to choose the right framework. It starts with choosing between one of the three app development approaches, i.e, native, hybrid and cross-platform. While many still believe that native is the best approach to retain application’s performance, usability and UX, several others favor hybrid and cross-platform which helps in minimizing the overall development costs and time to maintain and market the app via code portability.
Each approach requires a different set of developer skills, tools, and other resources. Hybrid app development platforms like Apache Cordova, Sencha, Ionic etc. which have long been used and acclaimed by developers for its cost and multi-platform support benefits fails to deliver high performance and user experience. In comparison to that, cross-platform tools deliver user experience close to native via native UI components and Java technologies. To understand better, let’s compare the general properties of each platform.
The table above depicts that cross-platform is the best alternative to native application development. Now let’s consider some of the popular cross-platform alternatives that can be used for building enterprise applications.
Xamarin.Forms: Xamarin.Forms is a cross-development framework used for writing mobile applications in C# or F#. It supports all major mobile operating systems like iOS, Android, and Windows. Though, Xamarin.Forms was introduced in 2014, it was originally founded as Xamarin.Native (Xamarin.Android, Xamarin.iOS) in 2014 by Miguel de Icaza. Xamarin.Forms enable a dedicated Xamarin developer to share UI of all mobile platforms using XAML-based pages. It allows you to use common UI control libraries which are mapped to native UI controls on Android, iOS, and Windows. You can even write a business code library and share with Android, iOS, and Windows Xamarin applications.
NativeScript: NativeScript, developed by Telerik, is an open-source framework for developing native Android, iOS, Windows (preview) mobile applications. It utilizes JavaScript as its main language and supports TypeScript, CSS (restricted) for styling and Angular. Developers familiar with JavaScript, Angular2, CSS and HTML will find NativeScript easy to use. NativeScript’s UI stack is built on native platform rendering and layout engine by using native UI components which ensure that the user experience stays uncompromised. It provides full access to native APIs by using JavaScript.
ReactNative: ReactNative by Facebook is an open-source JavaScript framework for developing native applications. It enables 100% code reuse on iOS and Android platforms. It is based on React which is Facebook’s JavaScript library used for developing user interfaces. It further uses React’s diff algorithm, Virtual DOM to update UI and achieve efficient performance and support through native code when needed. Also, when you change an attribute of a component, it doesn’t mark it as dirty. Instead, it marks it dirty whenever you call a setState on a component. However, ReactNative re-renders all the dirty components at the end of event loop. It even allows you to use native code such as Objective-C, Swift or Java whenever you need.
There’s no shortage of platforms for developing cross-platform applications for Android and other