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Getting Started with Cross-Platform
Follow App Development in 2019
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Mar 18 · 6 min read
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By Reinder de Vries, founder of LearnAppMaking.com

Remember Adobe Flash? It was the ultimate cross-platform development tool.

Flash ran on any web browser or operating system — it could even run on early
versions of Android. And then came HTML5, that did many of the things Flash
could do…

Cross-platform development has long been the holy grail of building software.
Most cross-platform development tools promise you can build your codebase
once, and then run the app on any platform. Why build natively for every
di erent platform, if you can build it once and deploy on as many platforms as
you want?

You can see why this is so compelling. It saves you time and money getting
your app to market, and you can cut your maintenance and development cost
in half. And from a developer’s standpoint it’s also interesting. Developers get
to use the tools they know — JavaScript or C# for example — to build for
platforms they’re not familiar with.

In this article, we’ll take a ight through some of the new and established
cross-platform tools. The goal is to inform you about the di erent available
options for cross-platform app development in 2019.

[Whichever platform you choose, make sure you’re using a strong analytics tool
to quickly nd and x any bugs or crashes without having to hunt through code.
Start by checking out a free trial of Appsee, which records and replays crashed
sessions in real-time.]

Let’s get started!

PhoneGap

Image credit: Adobe PhoneGap

PhoneGap, now owned by Adobe, is a cross-platform development tool that

relies on web technologies to create apps for Android and iOS. You can use
HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to build a mobile app with a native look and feel,
without needing to write the same code twice for di erent platforms.

And that’s exactly where most cross-platform tools get in trouble. Take for
instance a smartphone’s camera. The code you need to use that camera is
di erent for iOS and Android. In fact, the programming languages you use to
create native apps on those platforms — Swift and Java — are 100% di erent.

PhoneGap solves this problem by giving you a uni ed approach with web
technology that has a native look and feel. It looks like a native iOS or Android
app, but it isn’t.

Tools like PhoneGap also provide uni ed APIs to interact with hardware such
as the camera, media library, le storage, and GPS. Their underlying code
may be di erent between platforms, but the way they work are very similar.
On top of that, tools like PhoneGap allow you to access platform-speci c code
by using plugins.

Xamarin

Image credit: Xamarin

Xamarin, now owned by Microsoft, is a cross-platform development tool that

lets developers build native iOS and Android apps with the C# programming
language. Xamarin apps are compiled ahead-of-time, which means they don’t
su er the performance drawbacks that interpreted or web-based tools have.

The Xamarin platform is a good example of the perhaps single greatest bene t
of using cross-platform tools: developers can use a programming language
they already know. C# is a programming language originally developed by
Microsoft within its .NET platform. Developers familiar with the Microsoft
environment for building software, such as C# and .NET, can easily pick up
Xamarin development because the tools are virtually the same.

It’s worthwhile to investigate how PhoneGap is di erent from Xamarin. With

PhoneGap, your cross-platform app consists mostly of a native web view that
loads HTML content. Native UI such as buttons and toolbars are mimicked,
which gives the appearance of a native app. Doing this, and interpreting
JavaScript on-the- y, often makes web-based cross-platform apps feel
sluggish.

Xamarin apps are compiled, which means they run directly on a smartphones
hardware and not in a web view. C# code is shared between native platforms,
which means that most of the app’s code can be written once in a single
programming language. And Xamarin apps also have access to native APIs
directly, which means developers can use platform-speci c frameworks like
iOS’s ARKit.

React Native

Image credit: GitHub

React Native was originally announced by Facebook in 2015, and has gained
in popularity in recent years. It takes an entirely di erent approach to cross-
platform development by using JavaScript code to power native components.

Instead of imitating native components, or compiling to native code, it

interprets JavaScript at runtime to display native UI elements, respond to user
interaction, and to perform tasks. Developers don’t have to rely on slow web
views to render their apps, and they don’t have to learn iOS development.

The rise in popularity of React Native, and the fact that it’s open source,
meant that many developers built third-party components for the platform,
which further sped up its adoption. And just like Xamarin and C#, web
developers can easily pick up React Native because it uses the JavaScript
language they already love.

A recurring theme in cross-platform development is “code once, deploy

twice.” Can you really share 100% of the codebase between platforms?
Depending on the complexity of the app you’re building, you can. React
Native and Xamarin in particular have perfected the principle of the shared
codebase, without the typical performance bottlenecks.

If you’re investigating cross-platform tools with the goal of building a cross-

platform app, keep in mind that there’s always a chance that you’ll need to
write platform-speci c code. This means you’ll need native iOS or Android
developers on your team, albeit not full-time.

Flutter

Image credit: Flutter

Flutter, built by Google, takes cross-platform development to a new level. It

was rst released in May 2017, and its rst stable 1.0 release was made in
December 2018.

Flutter is on the bleeding edge of cross-platform development, and it deserves

special attention. It’s so close to the “code once, deploy twice” phenomenon,
by completely sidestepping the native platforms. And it’s quickly gaining
speed in the developer community.

The way Flutter works is by compiling Dart source code to native code, which
runs on the Dart virtual machine. You can compare this to Xamarin, which
runs native code directly on the smartphone hardware, and to React Native,
which runs interpreted JavaScript code in a native app.

A particularly interesting feature of Flutter is called Hot Reload. With Hot

Reload, changes to the source code of an app can be directly injected at
runtime. It’s like reloading a web page, without needing to recompile the
entire app. Hot Reload also retains the state of the app, so you can code and
interact with the app at the same time.

Similarly to other tools, Flutter provides shared code for platform-speci c

features such as Android’s and Apple’s UI design, as well as the option to build
platform-speci c plugins. Platform-speci c APIs and SDKs can be used
natively.

Further Reading
In its own way, Adobe’s Flash could have been what Xamarin, PhoneGap,
Flutter, and React Native brought to cross-platform development. We’ll never
know if Flash was too early, or simply too late.

There’s a reason Flash is part of this cross-platform development story.

Development tools are bound to change, as new concepts and paradigms rise
in popularity, and others fade away. Who knows what cross-platform
development tools get launched in 2019, 2020, and onwards?

As these tools get more advanced, the “code once, deploy twice” holy grail
gets closer. Perhaps one day, we can really build an app once, and run it
anywhere.

About the Author

Reinder de Vries is a professional iOS developer. He teaches app developers
how to build their own apps at LearnAppMaking.com. Since 2009 he has
developed a few dozen apps for iOS, worked for global brands, and led
development at several startups. When he’s not coding, he enjoys strong
espresso and traveling.

Mobile App Development iOS App Development Android App Development Technology

Programming

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