Mobile technologies are pretty much the norm for businesses nowadays. However, many businesses still focus on a single mobile platform avoiding the other ones, though it’s important to focus on all popular mobile platforms in order to grow consistently. Having just one mobile application won’t be enough in the long run. The business application should run on a myriad of devices regardless of the platform (iOS, Android, Windows, BlackBerry etc.).

This is where cross-platform apps come in. They are applications with a single code base capable of running on multiple operating systems. They are of two types: 

• Native Cross-Platform Apps
  
• HTML5 Hybrid Cross-Platform Apps
  

Though they are generally considered invaluable by businesses, they do come with some cons just like everything else in the industry. Let’s go through the merits and demerits of Cross-platform mobile application development. 

Pros

• If properly planned and executed, it’s possible to reuse more than 60% of the code across platforms, which in turn increases development time and reducing costs. 
  
• The benefits are more evident during the maintenance phase, as a bug once identified in a common codebase needs to be fixed only once.
  
• With Agile development, it’s possible to use existing programmers rather than appointing new programmers or have the existing programmers learn platform-specific development language.
  
• Unit tests need only be performed once for the common, which means there will be more room in the budget.
  
• It’s ideal for B2B applications and business process automation applications where time to deployment and proper use of resources are more considerably more important than the design.
  

Cons

• When it comes to processing power, handheld devices like smartphones and tablets may not be as powerful as a computer. This is evident in mid-end devices that don’t possess the hardware power to run HTML5 animations. So hybrid cross-platform apps may feel quite sluggish in such devices. Phones with older operating systems may also experience issues. 
  
• It’s not easy to render modern HTML and CSS as the gradients require more GPU and CPU resources. This also means the hybrid apps will drain the battery faster compared to native cross-platform apps. 
  
• In order to communicate with native plugins, hybrid apps rely on callback-style programming. However, this can make the code needlessly complicated. 
  
• GUI may often need to be coded numerous times to obtain the look and feel appropriate for the platform. 
  
• As the more popular mobile operating systems evolve, and new features are added, it becomes more challenging for cross-platform SDK vendors and developers. The developers may also find it difficult to upgrade an app to newer versions, once the OS update is released. 
  

Regardless of the setbacks, HTML5 hybrid cross-platform apps are still of great importance in the development of B2B digital solutions and automation of business processes. Native cross-platform apps on the other hand do not fail to deliver 100% platform compatibility and great performance.