The changing landscape of app development

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With 70% of all eCommerce transactions occurring on mobile devices, mobile is no longer a marketing channel that a company can afford to ignore.

The cost of developing separate apps for Android and iOS devices has always made mobile development an expensive proposition.

However, recent innovations mean that the scales are now tipping the other way, with the cost of ownership decreasing amidst massively increased use of mobile apps as a primary purchasing medium for so many goods and services. 

Cross-platform development

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The ideal for any company is to have one provider, app and process for each app platform - web, desktop and mobile. Up until now, this wasn’t possible - early attempts at cross-platform app development have been somewhat experimental and faltering, but the latest versions of cross platform app development tools have changed the playing field.

It’s now possible, using Google’s innovative Flutter tookit, to write one codebase for web, desktop and mobile apps. This massively decreases development time - by up to 50% -  and also means that your provider is supporting one single codebase for all your applications.

One codebase for web, desktop and mobile apps

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Introduced in 2017, Flutter was originally designed to bridge the gap of separate Android and iOS app development, but has since evolved to serve web and desktop apps as well.

Flutter is also quick and easy to write, based on a language called Dart. It has the fastest time to market of any development framework, and also uses a game-like graphics rendering engine and produces extremely attractive products.

You can read more about our expertise in Flutter app development here. 

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Is Flutter ‘The next big thing?’

The development community appears to think so, with massive support and adoption of Flutter. Developers like simple, well-documented, well-supported application frameworks. Google has gone the extra mile to make sure that Flutter is attractive to developers and as a result, has become incredibly popular.

Over half a million apps have been written with it since 2018, and there are rumours that Samsung will abandon Android this year in favour of an operating system called Fuchsia, which uses Flutter as its core.
Whilst the rumours of the imminent death of native development may be exaggerated, it’s becoming increasingly unusual to develop new apps using anything other than cross-platform frameworks. There are still use cases for native development but these revolve mainly around specific hardware integrations or the use of platform-specific functionality.

In Conclusion

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What was once an expensive proposition, mobile app development is now becoming much more affordable. The future of mobile app development also ties in with web and desktop development, with Google making overtures to dominate the app development environment in the near future.

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