10 Pros and Cons of Mobile App Platforms | Cross-platform App Development

If you want to develop a perfect well design mobile application that works for every operating system, then it is most important to look for advantages and disadvantages of the platforms first. You can find many platforms are available to develop mobile applications over the internet. You may also face difficulties and conflicts while developing mobile apps. Make sure to do some study around it and develop the app accordingly.
About Mobile App Platforms —
What are the advantages of mobile application development platforms? What are negative effects of mobile app platforms? What are the advantages of using Android mobile platform? What are the disadvantages of application platforms? Lets digg into it.

In the world of technology, you can see there are billions of mobile applications are available on Google PlayStore or Apple iStore. To develop any mobile application, there are many different platforms are available on the internet, where you can design and develop a quality application for your website or for your business.

Basically, any mobile application has two goals:

• First - it should acquire maximum numbers of customers, and
• Second - it should make high-quality engagement with the targeted audience.

Mobile development platforms give a single environment that possesses all of the developer tools for developers needed to create a mobile application. Most platforms are usually focused on creating iOS or Android applications.

There some cross-platform applications developer teams are also available, which provides an environment with specific native tools. This typically possesses hybrid functionality and tools to create applications across multiple operating systems like iOS and Android. Companies are in the need of mobile application developers with a platform to write, manage, and deploy mobile applications. This can be done with the help of a small app developer company or can be done on an individual basis.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Mobile App Platforms

Anyways, we are here to discuss what are the advantages and disadvantages of the platforms. Some platforms and app development websites provide you some App development tools. The developers also needs these different platforms in order to write, test, deploy, and manage mobile applications. Some platforms are allowed to develop mobile apps for below models:

• B2C (Business-2-Consumer)
• B2B (Business-2-Business)
• B2E (Business-2-Enterprise)

In the mobile app developing process, developer faces a lot of difficulties and challenges. What difficulties are there and what are the advantages and disadvantages of these platforms? This is what we are going to discuss through this page.

Advantages of Mobile App Platforms.

Let's start with Advantages of mobile app platforms first.

1. Greater Scope.

As you can see, there are millions of users are using smartphones on a daily basis. And all those active users are growing day by day. The majority of people are using either Apple or Android OS-based smartphones. And in order to target these audiences, business owners wanted to develop an app to serve their "online-active" customers so as to increase their scope and coverage.

If your application runs in both Android and iPhone mobiles, then it gives you the advantage of grabbing the potential audience and helps to address the greater market. And mobile app platforms help you design your app to address both iOS and Andoird type of customers.

2. Simple Marketing.

Typically, mobile applications are used for marketing or promotional purposes. This helps you to stay connected with all of your customers through an easy channel.

There are some platforms that facilitate the liberty of marketing applications for marketing through the messages. This way, you can address the big crowds easily and you don't have to create certain messages to catch a specific set of people.

3. Uniform Look & Feel.

This is yet another advantage of mobile platforms which helps you design the app that gives you a uniform look and feel. The overall look and design of your mobile application can impact on your customers as well as your developer team. It can be hard to sync with another platform when you wanted to switch to different App developers.

But by using some specific platforms, you can easily design any app in a well-structured manner and it gives a uniform look and feel to your App. It will also easy to sync with any operating system and helpful for your app developers as well.

4. Reusable Code.

Reusable code is another useful feature of mobile platforms. Usually, developers write single but generic code and that code can be re-used to develop similar kind of apps as and when needed by their customers. This is the only way they could serve thousands of customers in less time. Obviously, this needs minor changes to be done according to the new customer but this avoids doing everything from scratch.

Developers can easily extend and adapt to new applications through such platforms.

5. Reduced Development Cost.

Some business owners make the mistakes of developing different versions of applications in both iOS and Android platforms, which means that they pay for two apps instead of one. But, there are some cross-platform app platforms are available in the market and are cost-effective to cut-down costs of app's development.

By using such cross-platform app development, you can get 2 types of apps at the same time and your app will work on both iOS and Android OB-based mobile phones. Ultimately, this way you can reduce App's development cost automatically.

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Disadvantages of Mobile App Platforms.

So far we have seen the positive side of mobile platforms, now let's move on to Disadvantages of mobile app platforms.

1. Different Tools and Languages.

There are many tools to make mobile applications such as Unity, Ramp, PhoneGap, Grapple, Open Plug, Rhombille, Titanium, and many platforms are there. And different languages are being used by these tools. So it is difficult for your developers to switch to another tool since different languages can be used by the new tool than that of the language in which your app is currently built.

No doubt your app developers are smart enough, but this could occupy too much of the developer's time while converting the current app to make it suitable for the new tool.

2. Platform Integration.

Platform integration is the software that integrates different applications and services. As we all know by now that, there are many different platforms are out there for mobile application development.

And if you want to integrate your app in different platforms, it needs local settings, preferences, notifications, and so many services. This may cause serious issues trying to shuffle multiple platforms. So, this is one of the major disadvantages of some mobile app development platforms.

3. Loss of Adaptability

Each platform has its own Adaptability features. While designing a cross-platform application, you can face loads of adaptability issues.

And to be honest, there is no platform currently available in the market which is diverse and adaptable enough which can adjust with another mobile app platform easily. This is one of the biggest disadvantages of it.

4. Loss of Flexibility.

Like Adaptability, each platform has its own Flexibility features. This is the reason behind their identity in the online market place.

When you design any cross-platform application, you tend to customize the application according to your needs. And this ultimately leads to reduction in the flexibility of the app.

5. Waiting for New Features.

As you can see, we usually update our mobile with the latest Apple iOS or Android OS. But, sometimes not all the apps are compatible with the newer Mobile Operating System. So app developers may need to do some changes within app itself to make it suitable with the latest OS introduced by Google Store or Apple iStore.

Although this is not done on a frequent basis, still the mobile app platform has to wait for new features so that the app can be updated according to the latest OS.

Bottom Line

Anyways, these are a couple of advantages and disadvantages of mobile app platforms to be considered. I'm sure these are helpful to you or your friends. I expect you to read all the above information carefully.

Still, if you find something else more promising than that of what I've enlisted above and want to suggest any other things, do not hesitate to use below comment section. Feel free to get in touch with me anytime. Happy to hear from you and would like to share as much information as possible to help others.