Why businesses are choosing Cross-Platform Solutions like React Native for mobile development?

In the modern world, businesses need to develop applications for mobile devices to reach more audiences. Each user can have a different phone model and there are tens of thousands of different models on the planet, but there is something that unites all phones — their platforms. That’s why it’s important to develop applications for all possible mobile platforms. The most popular platforms are iOS and Android.

Before you will start developing mobile applications for your business you need to know what technologies you can use and the pros and cons, there is no silver bullet for you.

You need to understand that each technology has its own pros and cons.

Native Solutions

By choosing native solutions (Swift or Objective-C for iOS, Java for Android) we need to develop the same-looks apps for each platform and it’s cost a lot of money and resources. And this approach introduces pitfalls like:

• Development Velocity — each feature for each platform needs to develop from scratch one team can do it fast and the second can block you if your business needs to implement it for both platforms at the same time or with a short-period delay.
• Hiring — as I mentioned you need two different teams and it means you need to hire engineers for each team (platform). And here also can be a problem, if 2 teams have the same resource (for example 5 engineers on iOS and 5 on Android) depending on the needs of your business, one of the teams will feel a lack of resources to deliver the feature at the time, because each individual feature will take different time for each team and this behavior may change from time to time (iOS team needs more sources today but tomorrow the Android team).
• Maintenance — since we have two codebases we need to maintain both at the same time, for example, it means if on any platform we have a bug we also need to make sure that it will not appear on another platform so we need to check two codebases at the same time. Also, code can’t be reused between iOS and Android teams.

Native solutions cost a lot of money and resources.

Why are we choosing Cross-Platform Solutions?

The main point of choosing a Cross-Platform Solution like React Native when we need the same application for each different platform (iOS and Android) is time and money (resources).

For many businesses, it can be a real deal. So why need to spend a lot of resources if Cross-Platform Solution can fit our business?

Before start working with Cross-Platform Solution you really need to know is it can fit for you.

What are Cross-Platform Solutions?

Cross-Platform Solutions allows building applications for different platforms using the same codebase.

With cross-platform mobile solutions, you can develop applications that feel and looks like native apps.

Cross-Platform Solutions becomes more and more popular. Let’s figure out why.

What Cross-Platform Solutions gives us?

Save Time Money

For many businesses, it’s a really big advantage. You can develop MVP, add features, and close business needs without losing a big piece of your budget and time.

One team, one codebase

You need only one team (of course you can split it into sub-teams) to develop an application for each platform and only one codebase which you maintain.

Implement new features

We can reuse our code instead of developing new codes for every platform. This saves time as well.

Same Design

User Interface or UI is an important thing to consider for any app or software. Cross-platform solutions allow you easier to sync your design between different platforms.

We talked about the Pros of Cross-Platform Solutions, but does it have any cons?

The answer: Of course, like any other solution. It was great world if we just have one technology where everything is good and it has no problems.

Performance Issues

Cross-Platform Solutions in most cases are slower than native ones. So you need keep an eye on this.

Flexibility

Cross-Platform Solutions add limitations and we need to know them.

Security risks

This is the place to debate because each solution has it. Since Cross-Platform Solutions are open-source you need to know security risks. Also, track all libraries and third-part solutions that you use with it.

One of the most popular Cross-Platform Mobile Solution is React Native. In this article the main focus on React Native, the alternative for you can be Flutter, also but there a lot of other.

What is React Native

React Native is a JavaScript library for building user interfaces for native apps. It often uses to build mobile apps. But you can build Windows, TV, MacOS apps.

If your team already know React it’s a good point to look at this solution.

Big community also play a big role in it. You can find a lot of pre-make solutions for your application that also speed up your development process.

But… you should really understand and know the Pros and Cons of this (as other) technology to invest in it. There are many resources where you can find advantages and disadvantages, no matter what Cross-Platform solution you will use. Here is just one of them.

Who’s using React Native?

A lot of big and small businesses are using React Native for their apps. You can find the list of Showcases here.

One of successful cases where big compony fully migrate from native code to React Native is Coinbase.

Shopify also decided to build all of its new mobile apps using React Native.

Of course one of the negative and most popular case working with React Native was in Airbnb. But it doesn’t mean React Native is bad, it means it’s not for each businesses.

Conclusion

So now you know the advantages and disadvantages of Cross-Platform Solutions. And the answer to use them or not is it depends on your business needs. It is only on your side to try Cross-Platform Solutions or choose native technology. For a lot of companies Cross-Platform Solutions can be a real deal, also for others not.