5 Best Tools for Cross-Platform App Development

5 Best Tools for Cross-Platform App Development

As the number of gadgets has increased and OS updates have become frequent, cross-platform app development has become a revolution for developers. Previously, it was very difficult and time-consuming to code native apps for all operating systems. 

But today building apps that perform the same on all devices has become a breeze by the use of tools and platforms that make it easy to use one codebase to repurpose your app for different OSs. Today we’ll discuss the best tools that are popular among developers for cross-platform mobile app development.

1. Adobe PhoneGap

Adobe is popular for providing their customers with easy-to-use and affordable products. Their cross-platform development tool is no exception. PhoneGap is an open-source software used extensively by developers for building apps that don’t use much of native phone features. It gives your app access to device-level APIs by wrapping it in a native application container. 

PhoneGap allows you to build cross-platform apps using popular web technologies like HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript. It not only makes your app functional for other OSs but it also makes them ready for the App Store and Play Store. The quality of apps can descend for apps with the high-level graphical interface but you can find plug-ins for solving this problem. Get a free mobile app consultation by a global top 10 app development company.

Supported Platforms: iOS, Android, Windows Phone, BlackBerry, Firefox OS.

2. Unity3D

Unity3D is popular for its high-end graphics which make it the best for gaming developers and companies. But the developers going for apps with extraordinary functionality can also benefit from this framework. It takes your code in Boo, C#, or UnityScript and processes it to work on nearly 17 platforms. 

You can use Unity3D to distribute your app to the App Store and Play Store. It also allows you to monitor your app performance and analyze its popularity. Unity Connect is the perfect open-source community if you are new to mobile development. 

Supported Platforms: Android, iOS, Windows, PlayStation, Linux, Xbox, Wii, Web

3. Appcelerator

Appcelerator is the easiest platform among others as it allows native app development by deploying a single JavaScript codebase. It is best for web developers who want their content in a mobile app with native functionality as it doesn’t wrap your code around a web container like other tools. 

Appcelerator provides support for hundreds of libraries, mobile devices and other mobile development platforms. This helps in their goal of reducing your product’s time to market. It has pre-built connectors available for MS Azure, MS SQL, Salesforce, MongoDB, Box, the Eclipse-based IDE Studio, and various others. It’s known to be a bit laggy but mewer versions are more stable.

Supported Platforms: iOS, Android, Blackberry

4. Sencha Touch

Sencha is a leading platform that builds cross-platform mobile applications using hardware acceleration techniques which makes its apps extremely efficient and high-performance. It provides support for a number of third-party libraries and built-in testing capabilities. It has a large collection of native-looking themes for many major OSs so your apps look good too.

Building back-end is made extremely easy with Sencha Touch as it provides an incredible data package for working with data sources. Integration with native and third-party APIs is also extremely easy. However, its commercial licencing program makes it difficult to access all of its capabilities.

Supported Platforms: iOS, Android, Blackberry, Windows

5. Xamarin

Xamarin has been used by well-known companies such as IBM, Foursquare, and Microsoft. It provides developers with features that make it worthy of this honour. Apart from the App Store and Play Store distribution, they provide a free package for beginners and provides built-in git integration. 

Another important feature that makes it the first choice of developers in the multi-platform testing capability. You can code your app in C# or ruby and then test it in different OS environments to identify any native bugs beforehand. On the downside, Xamarin is not compatible with many 3rd party libraries.

Supported Platforms: iOS, Android

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