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If you are thinking about building a cross platform app for your business or website, having knowledge of some of the recent happening, tools and tactics will be a great help for you. In this post, we will discuss about new trends, figures and tools that will help you in making a better cross platform mobile app.

Native is no longer the best way of mobile development

Now that iOS vs Android battle has never been so heated, developing a 100% native app for each platform could be too costly and complex affair. To deal with this, you should go with cross-platform mobile app development.
In Cross Platform development, third party SDK's are used so that your app can be compatible with as much as platform as possible. However, before going on that route, here are some tips that will come in handy:

• Make sure that You really will be making app for multiple platform, because, in many cases, doing using cross platform development but then only publishing the app on one platform may be expensive than Native development.
• Make a clear UI impression about how your app will look, try making the UI consistent across all platforms.

The Three CORES of App development

Cross platform mobile development has skyrocketed in recent years and this is all because of three things: HTML5, CSS and JavaScript.

While none of them can be as fast or as robust as native code, they still make it really easy to create mobile apps and then reuse the already written code to create the same app for other platforms.

No doubt that using native code will give you as much as stability and performance as possible, it come with its own downside. Probably the biggest downside will be having your app limited to one mobile platform only. While it might have worked a few years ago when iOS had monopoly on smartphone market, in today's word where mobile OS market is diversified, it will become lessen your reach.

HTML, CSS3 and JavaScript will help you make apps that can run on any platform and in future, it will result in lower maintenance cost of your app.

Cross Platform App Development tools that you should know about

Now that we have talked about why you should choose Cross Platform development instead of Native apps, let's take a look at some of the best tools that are built for cross-platform mobile app development.

Xamrin
Probably the most popular tool for cross-platform mobile app development., Xamrin packs a strong SDK for all commonly used platforms. Instead of interpreting the code on the fly, Xamrin actually compiles it and hence you won't need to worry too much about the performance of the app. Xamrin is currently owned by Microsoft so you can trust the tool.

Rhodes
Rhode uses Ruby as the programming language and to construct the UI, the trio we talked about earlier HTML5, CSS and JS are used. While Rhodes is not as widely used as Xamrin due to its lesser known programming language, it still might be the right option for you if you want to development apps more than just a couple of platforms.

PhoneGap
PhoneGap is a JS API relying development tool. For cross-platform mobile app development, you can use JS, CSS and HTML. It has embedded browser for UI and the flexibility and customizability are some of the biggest reason why PhoneGap is one of the most used development tools.