Mobile apps are now an essential part of businesses of all sizes. On average, users spend up to 3 hours per day on their phone. So, it’s crucial for business to have a mobile app for their product to build better customer relationship.

Before start developing mobile apps, you must consider certain factors to choose between the two i.e. native and the cross-platform development approach.

We’ll list below the different advantages and disadvantages of both native and cross platform mobile apps development approaches to help you choose the best suitable approach as per your needs.

Native Mobile app development

Native apps are those which are developed to be used specifically on a particular platform or operating system. For developing Android apps, we use Android Studio as an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) and Java or Kotlin as programming languages to develop android apps. Similarly, for iOS apps, we use XCode as an IDE and Swift or Objective C as programming language.

Following are the advantages and disadvantages of choosing native apps development approach.

Pros:

  • Native apps always suitable to achieve high performance. As they utilize all the available resources of the platform (i.e. Android), both hardware and software components like Camera, Bluetooth, Location, Network and so on.
  • Native apps are more responsive and provide familiar user interface for the users. This results in better user experience.

Cons:

  • Native apps are sometimes costly and the process of developing native apps may consume more time to finish.
  • You may require to develop separate app for each platform that you want to support.

Cross Platform Mobile App development

Cross Platform apps are developed with a single re-usable codebase to be used on multiple platforms or operating systems. Many frameworks and tools are available for developing cross-platform like React Native, Flutter, Xamarin etc.

Following are the advantages and disadvantages of choosing cross platform apps development approach.

Pros:

  • Cross platform apps reduce the cost and time required to for developing mobile apps for different platforms, as single codebase is used.
  • Cross platform apps target a larger audience as compared to native approach.

Cons:

  • Cross platform apps may provide poor performance in some conditions. They also provide limited access to device features and hardware.
  • Cross platform apps also provide poor user experience, as they are platform independent.

Conclusion

As both approaches have their own benefits and drawbacks as well, it requires certain factors to keep in mind while choosing the best option of your choice.

You should choose native mobile apps development approach if you want to achieve high performance and best user experience. Cross platform apps, on the other hand, are useful for simple and limited feature apps like games and content information apps.