Discuss The platform, Cross or Native For App development?

The crucial significance of mobile app development in online shopping is best reflected by the fact that in US on black Friday sales 2013, the online shopping traffic through mobile grew to 39.7% of total online traffic. According to a report by IBM, smartphones drove 24.9 % of all online traffic as opposed to tablets at 14.2 %. While the sales through smartphones rose by a whopping 43% from year 2012, the tablets drove 14.4 % of all online sales, double that of smartphones which was 7.2% of all online sales. Moreover, the app installation too grew by 23%. Online shopping through smartphones and tablets is growing exponentially with more and more transactions every day, thus there is an opportunity for e-commerce marketers to extend themselves to customers.

Similarly, core issues as inventory management, order management can be effectively handled with enterprise mobility apps. While, on the customer front, mobile shopping provides a unique opportunity as a rapidly growing share of e-commerce. Shoppers as such use their smartphones and tablets to access online product information and reviews. While in many instances, a mobile optimised website is sufficient, However the imminent benefits of a mobile app development gets magnified when there are loyal repeat customers who make multiple purchases. The mobile space presents itself as a huge potential, because a well built mobile app targeted towards the right audience can achieve tremendous level of engagement. Users too will see increased value over time through deeper engagement by integrating seamless navigation and usability of the mobile.

However, the app must provide additional added benefits to the customers, secondly, the initial investments and ongoing maintenance costs should compensate for the added benefits. The mobile app must be a brand extension of the e-commerce brand and provide an alternate shopping experience. So when you as an e-commerce marketer seek to invest in the mobility space, you have the choice to either build native or cross platform apps. While both, cross or native apps have their own distinct advantages and disadvantages. At the outset, the focus must foremost be on the target audience buying behaviour as the pivotal point for the e-commerce company.

The following are the challenges and benefits of native and cross platform apps.

Native Apps:
Native app is essentially a code configured using platform specific tools for an individual mobile platform or devices. Thus while for Android it is Java and Android SDK, it is objective-C and iOS OS for iOS. Native apps give better performance, responsive and consistent layout. It also allows access to all of device’s functionality and features. Developed for a specific platform, they cater to take advantages of all paraphernalia of device’s specific capabilities.

Cross platform Apps:
Cross platform apps are essentially web apps that run inside of a browser. The real benefit of cross-platform app is that developers can write the code once in one language and later compile them to multiple platforms. There exist a growing number of cross platform in both quality and quantity. It offers an opportunity to reach a larger audience across all leading mobile platforms.

In cross platform apps you can take advantage of HTML5 and CSS3, use javascript to write the code, deploy your apps to multiple platforms, even as you access native features. Ideally for a simple look and feel, the cross platform apps offer a standard performance and can be app ported across multiple platforms.

Following are the crucial points that merit attention:

The decision to choose between native and cross platform apps must be foremost based on two fundamental criteria namely the target audience and the budget constraints. The following are the others major criteria.

Generally in mobile app development, it is preferred to build a native app over cross platform app to fully optimise the device capabilities. Native apps also perform better and offer rich user experience. Developing, deploying and maintaining the mobile app is a huge resource intensive investment and a leap for an e-commerce company. Therefore,you must choose either native or cross platform mobile app development according to your unique business needs and resources.