Mobile Application Development Platforms: Pros and Cons

Mobile devices have become an essential part of day-to-day life - not only for communication needs, but also for business, marketing finance, and more. In fact, according to we are social, active mobile subscriptions around the world for 2014 account for almost 93% of the world's population. Given this high demand for mobile devices, businesses need to provide highly responsive, rich UI apps that can run on multiple devices. The mobile application development industry has emerged to cater to this need.

Compared to desktop and web application development, mobile app development and technology is still new. However due to the high demand and an unbelievable growth in the mobile app market, the technologies used for application development have evolved in a very short time. Many new platforms, programming languages and UI libraries have been introduced and are being applied specifically to cater to mobile software development.

This article looks at the most popular platforms for mobile application development, focusing on pros and cons from the app developer’s perspective.

Mobile Application Platforms

Depending on the operating system environment a mobile phone uses, mobile application platforms are categorized in to three major categories:

• iOS(for iPhone and iPad)
• Android
• Windows Phone

iOS Application Development

One of the major reasons developers favor iOS application development is that iOS apps often earn good monetary return son application download. A comparison published on SensorTower indicates that an Android developer earns $0.19 per download whereas an iOS application developer earns $1 per download. iOS provides an all-in-one Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for developing sophisticated applications; therefore the application development is much easier. Furthermore, studies indicate that Apple users are willing to spend more money on mobile apps than the average Android user.

One disadvantage with iOS apps is that they cannot run flash or shockwave videos, as the iOS platform does not support them. Further, iOS apps run only on Apple devices, which owns less than 15% of the global smartphone market. The Apple store also has a stringent process for app approval, which can discourage developers from creating apps for the iOS platform, but which also helps ensure quality apps.

Android Application Development

Android devices have gained acceptance in the mobile market at an unbelievable pace. Android apps are built using Java. Most developers are familiar with Java and find it easier to develop Android apps. There are many places - such as GooglePlay, the Amazon AppStore and AppsLib to market Android applications. Publishing the apps on GooglePlay is relatively easier, and there are several other Android marketplaces to publish your app to reach a wider audience.

The downside of the Android platform is that its development platform, which is Eclipse-based, is difficult to learn. Features for creating advanced mobile applications are limited to the Android development platform. Another disadvantage is that there is a large range of devices using different versions of the Android platform, therefore when you develop an app; it needs to be extensively tested against each device and version for compatibility, which requires significant effort on software testing and QA.

Windows Phone Application Development

Windows mobile devices continue to grow in popularity and apps for these devices are therefore in significant demand. The primary reason Windows phones have a sustainable market share in the mobile app domain is that they are one of the oldest and most stable mobile development platforms.

Microsoft provides the Windows phone application framework along with the Windows phone IDE. As with any other Microsoft development platforms, Windows phone’sSDK and IDE are very user friendly, which makes it a good development platform for a beginner. Although the mobile application market is dominated by Android and iPhone apps, Window is often preferred, especially when developing enterprise level mobile applications. However, developing apps for Windows phone does not give very good monetary returns, because market share is quite low and the growth is slow. Further, the Windows mobile development environment does not cater to advanced application development, such as single page applications. Further, developers need to be cognizant of memory usage required by apps because Windows mobile devices have less memory support compared to Android and Apple devices.

Cross-platform mobile Application Development

Due to differences across different development platforms, it is very difficult for businesses to develop native mobile apps that cater to all platforms. The alternative is hybrid apps - applications that can run on any mobile platform. A hybrid app is developed using web technologies that run inside a native app container. There are several cross-platform mobile application platforms that are being heavily used in mobile software development for developing hybrid applications. PhoneGap, jQuery Mobile, Sencha, Adobe, and Antenna are among the most popular cross-platform mobile application development frameworks. Cross-platform mobile app development heavily relies on HTML5, jQuery and single page application (SPA) frameworks such as angularJs and knockoutJs. The combination of these tools and frameworks result in sophisticated mobile apps that provide a rich user experience and high performance on any mobile device. However, hybrid apps are often known for their not-so-user-friendly designs that fail to provide good user experience as the native apps.

Mobile devices have become an essential part of day-to-day life.