Nobody these days is content with only one smart device. People are using Windows on their laptops, iOS on their Mac, Android on their phones and again iOS on their iPads. Not to mention our love for the Amazon’s Kindle. So to create harmony between mobile apps on all the different devices, cross platform app development can make any developers life much easier. That way the said the app will run both on Android and iOS while its code can be modified for progressive web apps and desktops app (with the framework like Electron).

So to define cross platform applications, you can say that these are the apps which are compatible with more than one operating systems while using a single code base. Cross platforms mobile Application development services have their own limitations for sure but they are not without their perks. Depending upon your application development needs you can choose whether pros of cross mobile application development outweigh its cons. In this article, we are enlisting them both for your convenience. But before going on to tell you about pros and cons of cross platform apps, we would like to tell that the cross platform development can also be further categorized based on the two techniques for its development:

All operating systems offer their own SDKs (Software Development Kit) with their own preferred programming languages nowadays, for mobile application development. Apple has Objective-C and Swift; while Android prefers Java. The apps that are developed with preferred language in official SDK are native apps.

But now it's possible to use the APIs offered by these native SDK in other programming languages. A third party vendor chooses the programming language he prefers and creates a unified API on native SDKs. A unified API can support multiple OS with a single code base. This third-party vendor also provides an IDE for the creation of native app bundle for iOS and Android from single cross platform code base.

But since the app is still developed in a native API, it has the functionality of a cross-platform app but the performance of a near-native app without any noticeable lag.

Mobile apps depend on backend web service for the larger portion of their business logic. The creation and management of effective GUI make up for almost 60% of the code of any mobile app.

Given the fact that all major OS (Android, Windows, and iPhone) have an advanced browser component in their SDKs. By leveraging this Web View component, programmers can design and program their app using standard HTML5 web technologies. So by the time the project is complete the app has at least one native frame and HTML/ JS executed in Web View, hence the name ‘Hybrid’. Some JavaScript-to-native bridge is used by app features that need sensor input (camera, geo location) or low-level functions like accessing the file system.