The Cost of Mobile App Development is Too Damn High!

prashanthi vadla
3 min readNov 25, 2022

--

A tipping point has been reached. Except for some special use cases, it no longer makes sense to build and maintain your mobile applications using native frameworks and local development teams.The cost of native mobile application development has been spiraling out of control over the past few years. It has become very difficult for new startups without substantial funding to build native apps, MVPs and prototypes. Existing companies, which need talent to re-engineer existing applications or build new applications, are battling companies around the world and will do whatever it takes to retain the best.

The old idea is that if you’re a large company or you’re flush with cash, as long as you throw enough money at native application development, you have nothing to worry about. This is no longer the case.

Facebook, the last company in the world you’d think was behind in the war for talent (because they’re not), is having problems with their native app that money can’t fix. The application became so large and complex that they were looking at compilation times of up to 15 minutes for their mobile app. Mobile application development company in texas This means that testing even small user interface changes, like moving something around a few points, can take hours (or even days).Along with long compilation times, any time they need to test a small change in their app, having to deploy and test an update in two different environments (iOS and Android) with teams working with different languages and frameworks, muddies the waters even more.

What about a hybrid?

Hybrid apps are HTML5 apps that are wrapped in a native container and provide access to native platform features. Cordova and PhoneGap are prime examples.

If you’re looking to build an MVP, a prototype, or just don’t care about the user experience that mimics a native app, a hybrid app might work for you, unless you’re going to have to rewrite the entire project. They want to go home.There are many innovative things happening in this space, my favorite is the Ionic framework. The hybrid is getting better, but it’s still not natively fluid or natural.

For many companies, including the most serious startups as well as medium and large companies, hybrid apps may not deliver the quality they want and their customers want, Mobile app development resulting in an unpolished and less professional feel.I’ve read and heard that of the top 100 apps in the App Store, zero of them are hybrid, I can’t back up this claim with evidence, but I wouldn’t doubt if the number is between zero and 5, and that’s one reason.

Solution :

If you’ve been keeping up with the mobile development landscape, you’ve undoubtedly heard of projects like NativeScript and React Native.

These projects allow you to build native-quality mobile applications with JavaScript and use the same basic UI building blocks as regular iOS and Android apps.

With React Native you can have a single engineer or team of engineers specializing in cross platform mobile app development, native desktop development and web development using existing codebase or underlying technology, shipping your applications to App Store, Play Store. And the web at a fraction of the traditional price without losing the benefits of native performance and quality.

While React Native apps typically range between 80% and 90%, Cross platform application development companies it’s not unheard of to reuse up to 90% of their code across platforms.

If your company uses React Native, it eliminates the separation between teams, resulting in more consistency in both the UI and APIs being built, speeding up development time.

No compilation is required with React Native, as the app updates instantly on save, speeding up development time.

React Native also lets you use tools like Code Push and AppHub to remotely update your JavaScript code. This means you can deliver updates, features, and bug fixes to your users instantly, skipping the process of bundling, submitting, and getting your app approved on the App and Google Play stores, a process that can take between 2 and 7 days (the App Store being the main pain point in this process). This is something that is possible with hybrid apps but not with native apps.

If innovation in this space continues since release, in the future you’ll be able to build for platforms like the Apple Watch , Apple TV , and Tizen .

NativeScript is still very new due to the Angular 2 framework released from beta a few months ago, but it also has a good future as long as Angular 2 has a good share of the market.

Read more : Android application development companies in Washington

--

--