Expand Your Audience with Cross Platform Apps

One of the questions I get the most often from teams who are considering building mobile applications is whether to start by targeting Android or iOS. First off, a big struggle is finding out which platform is most popular among your users. Secondly, these platforms are really different in terms of the programming languages and deployment strategies. Today, we’re going to talk about a couple strategies for targeting both platforms with a single codebase which can be a great way to build MVPs quickly and #LaunchLean.

React Native

Probably the most popular framework for targeting both iOS and Android is called React Native. Based on Facebook’s popular frontend framework, React, React Native lets developers use existing skill sets built using dynamic websites and apply them to mobile development. The benefits here are clear. For developers, there’s no new complicated programming languages to learn here if they already know Javascript and React and they can fall back on the extensive React community and its large set of libraries and tools. For you, your business winds up with a great, responsive mobile application built quickly with modern technology. React Native apps can be built for both iOS and Android easily and with minimal effort.

Flutter

The new kid on the block in the cross platform app development space is Flutter, which is a framework developed by Google. Why consider a different framework if React Native already accomplishes the task, you ask? Flutter has a couple of interesting advantages over React Native, namely in the programming language itself. Flutter doesn’t use Javascript, but instead uses a language called Dart, which is also maintained by Google. While the Dart community is much smaller than that of Javascript, the ramp up time for learning Dart is actually quite short for programmers coming in from other lower level languages and should look quite familiar to Java developers specifically. Another advantage to Flutter is it has type-safety built in, thanks to Dart. In layman’s terms, this means more bugs will be caught by the computer system when building the app, before it ever gets into the hands of a user. Finally, not only can Flutter target iOS and Android, it can also be used to build dynamic web applications, as well which means you get even more bang for your buck.

When a company is in the early stages of work and still figuring out product-market fit, it may not make sense to build out fully native applications in separate complicated codebases for each platform. A great approach while still figuring out the needs of your users can be to build out your mobile application using a cross platform framework like Flutter or React Native. It can allow startups to get to market faster, pivot with more agility and test out new assumptions quicker with their target users.

For more on how the team at Subatomic can help you build out a cross platform application today, book some time to talk.