Top Challenges Often Associated with Cross-Platform Development

Posted by Stephen Foster on April 19th, 2022

A lot of businesses across industries are increasingly choosing cross-platform development for their application projects. The advantages are hard to miss. The most common cross-Platform development technologies, such as React Native development, are proven to shorten the application development lifecycle as app-developers are required to build only a single source code shareable across multiple platforms. Additionally, businesses also benefit from the low-cost development and gaining a competitive edge over competition that is focusing on building and investing in one single native application.

React Native, for example, combines the best features of native development and React, and helps build high-performance applications that run seamlessly across platforms and devices. However, React Native isn’t without faults and you need to consider its pros and cons before you decide to use it in your next application project. The major challenges in cross-platform application development include the following:

• Ensuring top-notch performance - In cross-platform scenarios or react native development, apps are designed to run across all devices and platforms. Since there\'s just one universal codebase used across every screen, device, and platform, multiple-platform apps fail to deliver the kind of performance that native apps provide to their users.
  However, customers in the digital era are not settling for anything less than the best when it comes to the applications they use, whether it’s a social media app, a streaming app, or an eCommerce app. Therefore, businesses need to take this factor into consideration while deciding on whether they need to build a native app or a cross-platform app.
• Keeping up with the latest platform updates - One of the most common challenges in cross-platform development is that users get delayed access to the latest features or capabilities introduced by a specific operating system. Since developers are tied to one particular framework, such as React Native or Flutter, the app users wait till the framework makes the necessary changes to embrace the new features. In native apps, however, the users get instant access to the new functionalities or features introduced by the OS, whether it’s iOS or Android.
• Increased dependency on the framework and code loss - In cross-platform, your application project gets tied to a particular framework. And moving to another framework or technology may not be an easy or feasible task; in some cases, switching to another framework may also cause code less. It is, therefore, essential to think of the bigger picture - so, think about all the features that you want to pack in your app and its needs in the future.

Conclusion
Businesses with plans to engage a broader audience at a relatively lower development cost can consider cross-platforms apps or React native development. Although this form of app development entails some limitations / challenges, the benefits far outweigh them. Companies often reach out to a wider customer base, deliver consistent experiences across platforms and devices, and build more revenue streams. However, to reap the full benefits of cross-platform development, companies must hire professional software development companies with a proven track record of developing high-quality multiple-platform applications.