Mobile applications have literally given the power to businesses to put their product in the hands of customers, wherever they are. They have become an intricate part of businesses where practically more than 60% of existing organisations and all the new startups are now developing applications. On the crossroads of choosing between the Android and iOS apps for business, businesses generally go for cross-platform app development tools as a solution. Cross-platform app development is the process of building mobile apps by writing a single code base wherein the app gets the capability of running on diverse operating systems easily. Some of the right cross-platform mobile app development tools for the year 2018 are:
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With over 1.4 million developers and 15000 companies already using Xamarin, the platform has already made its mark for cross-platform app development. The release of Xamarian 2, a year ago has made it all the more favorite of learned developers to develop native iOS, Windows, and Android apps using a single shared C# code base. You can do anything in C# which you otherwise do in Objective-C, Swift, or Java. It lets you use the same APIs, iDE, and language everywhere. It also offers its interface development tool and online classes through the Xamarian University program. Further, the app developed on this platform can be tested on a number of devices using the company’s cloud services.
It is an open-source solution based on the Apache Cordova project and is owned by Adobe. It is absolutely free to use and helps developers to convert codes written in HTML5, CSS, JavaScript to Native OS. It supports multiple platforms including iOS, Android, Windows, and WebOS with a single codebase. It provides a variety of plugins to choose from allowing the programmers to utilize their web skills. It maintains software development kits for each of the platforms created by app developers.
It is another cross-platform app development framework that allows developers to develop the code in HTML5 format. Once the code is made in the HTML5 format, it is very simple to use them for both iOS and Android phones. One just needs the PhoneGap to translate the code for doing so. Further, it offers a variety of cross-platform app development tools like Sencha Architect, Sencha Animator, Sencha IDE plugins and etc. Amongst all these, Sencha Ext JS 6 is one of the best and popular tools for cross-platform app development.
Based on React, Facebook’s JavaScript library for building user interfaces, this framework targets the mobile platforms instead of the browser. This framework is used for writing real, natively rendering iOS and Android applications. You just need to write one Reactive Native component and it seamlessly works on multiple platforms. Thousands of developers are using React Native. Rather you can say that it is the future of hybrid apps.
The cross-platform app market is expected to grow to $ 7.5 million by 2018. There are many other frameworks also like Corona, Kony, iFactr, Appcelerator and etc but the above-mentioned frameworks are the tried and best ones to stay in the race of growth in the coming year.
