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Hacker Noon
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Getting Started with Cross-Platform
Follow App Development in 2019
Appsee Follow
Mar 18 · 6 min read
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Cross-platform development has long been the holy grail of building software.
Most cross-platform development tools promise you can build your codebase
once, and then run the app on any platform. Why build natively for every
di erent platform, if you can build it once and deploy on as many platforms as
you want?
You can see why this is so compelling. It saves you time and money getting
your app to market, and you can cut your maintenance and development cost
in half. And from a developer’s standpoint it’s also interesting. Developers get
to use the tools they know — JavaScript or C# for example — to build for
platforms they’re not familiar with.
In this article, we’ll take a ight through some of the new and established
cross-platform tools. The goal is to inform you about the di erent available
options for cross-platform app development in 2019.
[Whichever platform you choose, make sure you’re using a strong analytics tool
to quickly nd and x any bugs or crashes without having to hunt through code.
Start by checking out a free trial of Appsee, which records and replays crashed
sessions in real-time.]
PhoneGap
And that’s exactly where most cross-platform tools get in trouble. Take for
instance a smartphone’s camera. The code you need to use that camera is
di erent for iOS and Android. In fact, the programming languages you use to
create native apps on those platforms — Swift and Java — are 100% di erent.
PhoneGap solves this problem by giving you a uni ed approach with web
technology that has a native look and feel. It looks like a native iOS or Android
app, but it isn’t.
Tools like PhoneGap also provide uni ed APIs to interact with hardware such
as the camera, media library, le storage, and GPS. Their underlying code
may be di erent between platforms, but the way they work are very similar.
On top of that, tools like PhoneGap allow you to access platform-speci c code
by using plugins.
Xamarin
The Xamarin platform is a good example of the perhaps single greatest bene t
of using cross-platform tools: developers can use a programming language
they already know. C# is a programming language originally developed by
Microsoft within its .NET platform. Developers familiar with the Microsoft
environment for building software, such as C# and .NET, can easily pick up
Xamarin development because the tools are virtually the same.
Xamarin apps are compiled, which means they run directly on a smartphones
hardware and not in a web view. C# code is shared between native platforms,
which means that most of the app’s code can be written once in a single
programming language. And Xamarin apps also have access to native APIs
directly, which means developers can use platform-speci c frameworks like
iOS’s ARKit.
React Native
React Native was originally announced by Facebook in 2015, and has gained
in popularity in recent years. It takes an entirely di erent approach to cross-
platform development by using JavaScript code to power native components.
The rise in popularity of React Native, and the fact that it’s open source,
meant that many developers built third-party components for the platform,
which further sped up its adoption. And just like Xamarin and C#, web
developers can easily pick up React Native because it uses the JavaScript
language they already love.
Flutter
The way Flutter works is by compiling Dart source code to native code, which
runs on the Dart virtual machine. You can compare this to Xamarin, which
runs native code directly on the smartphone hardware, and to React Native,
which runs interpreted JavaScript code in a native app.
Further Reading
In its own way, Adobe’s Flash could have been what Xamarin, PhoneGap,
Flutter, and React Native brought to cross-platform development. We’ll never
know if Flash was too early, or simply too late.
As these tools get more advanced, the “code once, deploy twice” holy grail
gets closer. Perhaps one day, we can really build an app once, and run it
anywhere.
Mobile App Development iOS App Development Android App Development Technology
Programming
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