Cross-platforms for startups. Trends, statistics and frameworks.

The majority of startups begin with the initial idea. It would definitely be better for them to start with having the necessary amount of money as well as assurance that everything will work. However, the world has apparently been created in order for us to be interested in living and developing something new.

There are proverbs, like: "You can not sit on two chairs at the same time”, but it is worth hesitating whether this saying is appropriate for cross-platform development method of precisely startups, given that the discussions about which development method is better - cross platform or native - are underway in the network.

You can read more about the difference between them in our article .

• The primary advantage of cross-platform development is budget savings almost by half. It is crucial for startups as it provides the possibility to test MVP with minimal cost.
• The time of work execution is reduced, because the cross-platform development is faster and easier. Once more, this is significant for startups, as ideas are innovative and need to get to market faster than competitors.
• The smaller developers team is required for work, which simplifies communication, especially when working with an outsourced company.
• The broader market and audience. The development of cross-platform applications provides the opportunity to reach a larger audience as cross-platform applications are compatible with several platforms and operating systems, such as Android, iOS. Both Android and IOS occupy almost 99% of the world market.
• Since the application works on many platforms and operating systems, it can be placed on a large number of stores and platforms. This, in turn, guarantees greater user coverage and increases the return on investment.
• The main purpose of cross-platform technology is to provide a user experience similar to native. Thanks to the advent of diverse advanced features and tools, the React Native application development approach can create a cross-platform application that feels and looks quite similar to native applications. React Native significantly focuses on the user interface, creating a high-quality, responsive interface.
• Any application needs timely security updates and a lot of improvements in order to keep its working capacity and proper functioning. The unified code base facilitates and accelerates not only testing, but also testing updates.

The main drawbacks are also noteworthy. Due to the presence of a large number of layers and applications of third-party modules (which are offered by a cross-platform development environment "just in case"), programs may run slower than their native counterparts. However, these shortcomings may be not essential for the development and testing of an MVP.

Cross-platform app development Frameworks in 2022

Flutter

Created by Google. It is a cross-platform development environment used to create applications for iOS, Android and Google Fuchsia. Flutter is an open source SDK that allows developers to create 2-D applications.

According to a 2022 survey, Flutter is the most popular cross-platform tool among developers.

Xamarin

Framework for people with the knowledge of C#. Xamarin is integrated with Visual Studio (IDE Microsoft) and allows creating programs for iOS, Android and Windows. 

Xamarin is one of the great cross-platform application development frameworks as it makes use of many helpful features, such as extensive community support, fairly good compile-time checking, and a native-friendly interface.

ReactNative

ReactNative, officially created by Facebook in 2015, is an open source web and mobile application development framework. ReactNative can be used for creating applications on diverse platforms, such as Web, Android, Android TV, iOS, tvOS, macOS, Windows, and UWP.

It is a perfect environment for JavaScript experts as it is possible to create applications both for Android and iOS using JavaScript instead of learning and coding in two different languages for different platforms. 

ReactNative has a built-in library for mobile applications navigation.

Cordova

Apache Cordova is one more framework for mobile applications development, originally created by Nitobi. Adobe Systems purchased Nitobiin in 2011, renamed it PhoneGap, and released an open source version of the software called Apache Cordova eventually.

It provides the possibility to use standard web technologies - HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript for cross-platform development.

Ionic

It is one more framework for mobile applications development with the help of JavaScript.

Ionic Framework is a free open source that provides a portable user interface toolkit for developing high-quality cross-platform applications for iOS, Android from a single codebase. It also has Ionic React, which uses React to create hybrid mobile applications.

As a conclusion, we can assert that a cross-platform development environment is optimal for the creation of startups in most cases.

You can find more information about our services and advantages of creating startups on our page .