Tips for cross platform app development

Learn more about utilising the latest technology to develop natively without duplicating effort or cost.

March 20, 2019

Screens from The Batting Labs app, showing the wicket calibration process

One of the main decisions when developing a native app is which platform should be adopted: iOS or Android? Whilst you will likely want to launch on both platforms eventually, many people assume only one can be achievable within their budget and timeline; however we firmly believe developing across both platforms needn’t result in a duplication of cost or effort.

A common solution adopted by many development agencies is to develop a single cross platform app using tools like Xamarin, Flutter or React Native. However, too often these tools lead to a poorer user experience with larger app sizes, impact performance for more demanding processes and limited UI capabilities.

Avoid underwhelming cross-platform development tools

At Bulb, we realised we needed a different way to offer a competitive solution without sacrificing quality. We felt the negatives of the cross platform tools were too great and the benefits of creating native applications too important to ignore. Instead, we design and develop with cross platform development in mind; all of our products utilise the latest technologies and architectures to make the codebases as cross compatible as possible.

Strategy

Adopt streamlined process for bespoke results

This means that once the first platform is complete, the second can be developed at a much faster rate, as all the logic can be replicated for the second platform without rewriting it from scratch. This means we are able to offer a completely bespoke design for each platform, ensuring both applications feel familiar to use and easy to engage with, whilst keeping development costs and timeframe to a minimum.

Keep app size small

Furthermore, we can take full advantage of each platform’s unique approach to reducing app size; this allows us to optimise applications, ensuring they are the smallest size possible. Size is often one of the greatest deciding factors for users to download or keep an application and we have found such an approach has provided real benefits for our clients in increased retention and engagement.

Our approach ensures we are able to offer our clients the most bespoke and optimised product without causing excess development time and cost to our solutions.

Interested in working with us on an app? Feel free to drop us a line.