The mobile app industry is thriving, with over 178 billion mobile apps downloaded in 2017, and the number to go up to 258 billion by 2023. It’s not yet over. The mobile app revenues from app downloads, ads, and app subscriptions in mobile apps are predicted to touch a thrilling amount of $693 billion by 2021!

The present-day competitive digital sphere in the mobile industry has paved the way for digital transformation. Every organization is eyeing to up its cross-platform app game while incorporating the right set of features and offer enhanced performance and an excellent customer experience. 

Finding success in this dynamic market is not a cakewalk. Building a cross-platform app lets your product reach a more significant audience cost-effectively.

The cross-platform app development frameworks trending in the software market enable developers to create state-of-the-art applications and grasp benefits out of digitalization.

Before moving ahead in the article, let’s first check out what we are referring to.

Read also: Native App Development Or Cross-Platform App Development: Which Is The Best Option For You?

Cross-Platform Mobile App Development: A Brief Description

Cross-platform mobile app development is the process of building engaging mobile apps that can be deployed or published on multiple platforms using a single codebase. You don’t need to develop the app numerous times using native technologies for every platform.

Leveraging the cross-platform mobile development approach helps you create robust digital solutions quickly and cost-efficiently.

Moreover, it is much less expensive as compared to native app development.

Let’s get into some of the features of cross-platform mobile app development.:

• Reusable Code: It allows you to write your code and export it to other operating systems and platforms.
• Convenience: It saves you from the hassle of learning multiple programming languages and different technologies.
• Manageable Code:  It helps manage and update your code once, and the changes are then synced and reflected in all the apps on different platforms.
• Cost Efficiency: It saves the cost of having multiple teams working on different versions of your app. You can get some development tools free of cost, and some with paid subscriptions for add-ons.
• Market Reach: You can increase your chances of having a more extensive user base, a higher return on investment, and higher revenues.

Quick Tips To Consider While Choosing The Best Cross-Platform Frameworks

We’ve come up with some quick tips to help you choose the correct mobile app development to develop your next mobile app.

Perform An In-depth Research

To develop a top-notch mobile app that will compete in the market, you need to first understand the demands of modern buyers and the latest mobile app trends. 

• Market Research: An in-depth market research will help you give valuable insights about similar apps in the market. They allow you know how they are solving the problems of the customers and the strategies your competitors are using to excel. 

• Consumer demands: As your business is customer-centric, it is essential to develop a mobile app that focuses on customer pain points. Also, focus on their future demands, and provide an inevitable user experience.

• Mobile app trends: You need to be mindful of the latest mobile app development trends in the market. It will help you to plan and strategize your app development for a robust and feature-rich outcome. 

Identify The Targeted Audience

Identifying the targeted audience is crucial when developing engaging and customer-centric mobile apps. The targeted audience that you are focusing on will play a significant role in the mobile app development process, app expansion, and growth.

You can create a questionnaire to get a clear picture of how to identify your target audience, 

• Who all are going to use the mobile application?
• What are the major problems that mobile application is going to solve?
• How does this application add value to your business?

These kinds of questions will help you understand customer expectations and would result in generating more revenue.

Consider Right Platform To Deploy App

The popular mobile operating systems Android, iOS, Windows, Blackberry, and Firefox are giving tough competition to each other in satisfying consumer digital needs. Most of the enterprises today utilize Android and iOS platforms for their business due to their significant market share.

Before choosing the best platform for your mobile application, here are some things that you need to keep in mind:

• Brand or app name
• Target audience
• Features
• Pricing 

Cross-platform app development frameworks help you get a compelling mobile app for Android and iOS on multiple devices. The apps offer an engaging and inevitable experience to customers across various platforms and devices anytime and anywhere. 

Read Also: Battle Of The Mobile App Frameworks-React Native Vs Native

Choose Top-Notch And Customer-Centric Features To Inbuilt Into The App

Be it an Android or an iOS app, the functionalities work differently for each of the platforms. For cross-platform app development, the device-specific features become highly crucial for your mobile app to run your app seamlessly. 

You are required to add the following features to your mobile app.

• Simplicity- Eliminate complex app navigation so that your customers can access information quickly and easily.

• Speed- The speed of your app is considered important for users as it shows how fluently your app is working. Make your app load time faster, as slow-loading pages take a lot of time and thus creates frustration.

• High-Quality Images- You need high-definition and detailed images to make an outstanding user experience. For this, you need to balance the speed of the app with functionality and resolution. 

• Flexibility- Your app must be available on all the three major operating systems- Android, iOS, and windows.  Also, your app should work flexibly with different screen sizes and resolutions.

• Security- Your app should be integrated with high-security features as it stores customers’ personal and sensitive information.

• Push notifications- Whether text, graphic, or both, push notifications are personalized and targeted messages that interest the user. 

• Regular System Updates- You need regular updates to make your app more relevant. It will improve markets and product quality. 

Build Right Wireframes

When you come up with your ideas for a leading mobile app development company, the mobile app developer provides an entirely different image of your concept regarding features, functionalities, and look and feel. 

It further helps check whether the client and the mobile app expert are on the same page or not in terms of ideas. It is an easy way to incorporate all the required features and functionality changes. Wireframes ensure unwanted bugs regarding the functionalities in the future. 

Analyze the App Budget 

While calculating mobile app development costs, you need to know a proper mobile app development process strategy. It helps you perform the right allocation of the budget across all the development stages.

Multiple costs that incur in mobile app development is:

• App development
• Outsourcing app development
• Hiring a mobile app developer
• App maintenance
• App updation
• App marketing

Your niche will decide your app budget, and the type of app you want, the features, and the functionalities you want in your app. All of them will add to the budget of your mobile app.

Focus On Delivering Inevitable User Experience

Your users play a major role in making your app a successful launch in the market. Either your app will taste success or be a big failure. If you fail to deliver a seamless user experience to your users, your users won’t be returned back. 

A user experience defines the look and feel of your app and the user engagement it delivers with your company and the services. 

User experience is the value an enterprise delivers to its users. Apart from this, it provides ease of use, provisions for seamless integration with third-party providers, improved performance, speed, and effectiveness for your target audience.

Why Cross-Platform Frameworks Are Mostly Preferred By Enterprises?

Cross-platform mobile app development is continuously evolving due to trending technologies, becoming more dynamic and attractive for developers.

Cross-platform frameworks assist developers in generating an innovative app that targets endless users.

Here we’ve listed why most businesses prefer cross-platform mobile app development to bring their mobile app on the floor.

1. Maximize Your Target Audience Reach

Leveraging a mobile cross-platform development approach enables you to build a compelling app and deploy it over multiple digital platforms. By simply creating a single app, you can target both – iOS and Android platforms, thus, maximizing your audience reach.

2. Reduced Development Cost

With the concept of ‘write once, run everywhere, cross-app development thus reduces the development cost. Reusable code and agile app development through development tools can lower down your cost of app development. Hence, to improve your business on multiple platforms and tools cost-effectively, cross-platform apps are the better option.

3. Easy Maintenance & Deployment

Since there’s only one developed app that runs over all platforms, it is easier to maintain and deploy code or changes. Regular system updates can promptly be synced over all platforms and devices. It ultimately saves your time and money. Moreover, if you find a bug in the shared codebase, it should be fixed once. In this way, developers can save a lot on time and money.

4. Quicker Development Process

The quick development process is another win-win situation when it comes to developing cross-platform apps. The team of developers can easily meet the expected deadlines when developing mobile apps with cross-platform frameworks.

5. Reusable Code

This platform facilitates the reusability of code again and again. With cross-platform app development, you can simply reuse the code rather than developing new code for every platform. It ultimately saves your time and resources as it eliminates repetition in the task of creating code.

6. Easy Integration with Cloud

Cloud is used by most enterprises today as it assures security, scalability, and reliability of the solution developed.

Cross-platform mobile apps are compatible and can take advantage of various plugins integrated with the cloud settings. You can simply integrate single source code with multiple plug-ins and extensions to improve the app’s scalability and functionality.

7. Faster Time-to-Market

A faster product or app launch in the market will boost your business growth and thus accelerate revenues. Cross-platform app development helps businesses to do that efficiently.

It will reduce your Time-to-Market (TTM) with fast deployment.

Moreover, if you need to transform or customize the app, it’s easy for the developers to make fewer changes in a single code. It also helps to deliver products more swiftly and seamlessly than the competitors by improving customer engagement.

8. Uniform Design

User Experience (UX) is a crucial thing to consider when developing an app or software. It is the first and foremost thing visitors check when accessing any app or website. It determines whether the overall customer journey is fruitful or not.

Users can recognize user interface (UI) elements and foresee their interactions over various platforms. It’s difficult to integrate the various development projects while developing multiple apps. Cross-platform mobile development tools allow developers and designers to build a uniform user experience that app users can enjoy.

In A Nutshell

Today, most companies create different mobile app versions of their websites to stay ahead in this competitive industry. The development of mobile apps through a cross-platform approach is the best preferable solution for businesses. It permits them to create efficient and reliable applications that are compatible with all digital devices.

It’s often difficult to predict the ever-changing market trends; there are many aspects to consider, including resources, skillset, timeframe, and planning. For businesses, hiring experienced app developers is the halfway to success.

We have an expert team of mobile app developers ready to offer the best rich features and scalable, designed mobile applications to grow your business faster.

Make the right decision before getting started with cross-platform mobile app development. We can be your experienced and reliable app development partner that can help you make a well-informed decision.