What are the Best Practices for Cross Platform App Development?

Nowadays, mobile devices have dominated our lives. From shopping to booking travel tickets or ordering your favorite food, everything can be done at just fingertips. As a result, major businesses are leveraging the power of mobile apps to reach their target audiences while building brand loyalty across the world. In such a scenario, the growth of the mobile app development market will reach $407.31 bn by the year 2026 at a CAGR rate of 18.4%. Well, there are a plethora of devices available in the market, and your mobile app must work effortlessly across all devices and platforms. It is better if your app runs across at least the widely used or popular devices or platforms to meet the customers’ needs. This is where the role of cross-platform app development comes into play as the most efficient and cost-savvy solution for businesses.

An Introduction to Cross-Platform App Development

Cross platform app development is a strategic approach to creating applications that run flawlessly and efficiently across different devices and platforms. Now, there is no longer a need to write separate code for the software that will be operating across different devices. Today, developers can easily develop cross platform applications using a single code base and quickly improve productivity.

In other words, developers can use any reliable cross platform app development framework and write code once, and then compile it to run the app across different platforms. This means it is easier to build high-performance and engaging apps for smartphones (iOS and Android), tablets, and PCs. Using cross-platform apps helps businesses to reach an older audience as quickly and efficiently as possible.

What are the Most Popular Cross Platform Apps?

There are thousands of cross-platform mobile apps available and some of the most popular ones include eBay, Google Pay, Dream11, BMW, and Toyota.

5 Best Practices for Cross-platform App Development

Keep Remember the Purpose in Mind:

Sometimes developers focus on creating the application for only one platform i.e., Android or iOS, and then move forward to create the other one. Well, this may cause inconsistent app behavior that ultimately leads to the failure of the entire cross platform app development project. Therefore, it is always important to work with an experienced team of developers who remember the purpose of building the cross-platform app from the start and add logic, features, and UI as per the requirement for multiple platforms. This helps to ensure consistency across different platforms and increases the chances of project success.

Define the User Experience:

Regardless of the feature-rich and highly functional mobile app, the user experience plays a significant role in making the application stay afloat in the market for a long time. Thus, it is important to define the user experience of the application to ensure the native look and feel. Not using the native features makes the application look generic may affect user engagement and ruin the overall user experience. A well-defined user experience, like that seen in Vision pro development, can significantly enhance user engagement and satisfaction.

Select the Right Framework:

Sometimes, cross platform app developers make the wrong decisions while choosing the framework causing issues like a long onboarding process, lack of features, code complexities, low flexibility, and scalability, and so on. Therefore, the developers must select the right cross platform app development framework. Listed below are the factors to be considered while choosing the framework-

• The percentage of code reusability
• Learning curve and onboarding time
• The type of components and pre-built components
• Platform consistency
• Programming language                                                                                            
• The size of the community

Consider Code Reusability:

No matter what type of cross-platform application you are developing, consider code readability as one of the best practices. This will allow your existing team of developers as well as the new developers to understand the code properly and make necessary updates in the future. To ensure code readability, the team can –

• Group the code
• Indent the code
• Ensure consistency in fields, classes, variables, and methods
• Add comments for new insights.

Get User Feedback:

User feedback not only helps to understand the app’s performance but also gives fair data on how the feedback varies across different platforms. This can be the best approach to identify the problems for the specific platform and make the changes for app improvement. 

There are many ways you can collect feedback from your users and analyze the relevant data.  Apart from ratings, reviews, suggestions, comments, and bug reports, you can use certain tools such as Firebase, Google Analytics, and Flurry. These tools help to track and measure the usage, performance, and behavior of your cross-platform application.

The Bottom Line

Cross-platform app development is the best way to connect with your audience easily and cost-effectively. For businesses looking to enhance their digital presence, partnering with cross platform app development services can ensure the creation of high-quality, versatile apps that work seamlessly across all devices.” Considering the above-mentioned best practices will help you to ensure the success of your mobile app development project in terms of performance, compatibility, maintenance, and security.