If you are planning to develop apps for your business, choosing the right platform is critical. With the market fragmented between Android, iOS and Windows, businesses should concentrate on all three platforms or at least Android and iOS, as their target is present on these platforms. Developing apps using native SDKs can add to development cost, and can lead to increased time-to-market, which can affect your business conversions. This is where platforms such as Xamarin, PhoneGap and Appcelerator Titanium offer a cost effective development environment with a quick turnaround time. Xamarin beats the other too in terms of scalability and implementation. Here, we take a look at reasons you should opt for Xamarin development.
Native Apps
Native apps deliver the best user experience as they make best use of the operating system as well as the hardware. With Xamarin you would be able to develop native apps that use device specific APIs. It supports development for Windows, Android and iOS, which together account for 97% of the mobile operating system market. Both PhoneGap and Appcelerator Titaniumon have their shortcomings. PhoneGap doesn’t support native performance, while for Titanium, native codes are converted from web codes. Hence, they quite don’t live up to the native apps user experience derived by developing native apps using Xamarin.
Cross Platform Development
One of the biggest pluses with Xamarin development is the fact that it allows you to develop apps for different platforms with ease. Using this platform, developers can create apps that can run on Android, iOS and Windows powered devices. Xamarin uses the “Write Once, Run Everywhere” philosophy that reduces cost of development for businesses. It uses C# that allows developers to compile the app for each platform individually. PhoneGap on the other hand limits the use of cross platform apps within the platform’s web browser. In case of Appcelerator Titanium, all the native apps are written in JavaScript but require custom XML and the native API for cross platform deployment. This is why Xamarin emerges as a clear winner for cross platform development.
Component Store
Why reinvent the wheel? This is the concept behind Xamarin’s Component Store as you would be able to choose from a large number of free as well as paid components that include everything from controls to cross-platform libraries thus easing out the app development and reducing the turnaround time. While both PhoneGap and Appcelerator Titanium have their own libraries and repositories for plugins, it doesn’t quite match up to Xamarin.
Testing Environment
Xamarin offers you the best testing environment among the three platforms. The XamarinTestCloud allows you to test apps developed for all the three platforms across devices of your choice thus offering continuous integration. The big advantage here is with the fragmented Android market where you will be able to test the app on both entry-level as well as flagship products from leading device makers.
If you are looking for a xamarin development company , we at Silver Touch Technologies would help you develop the most inspiring mobile apps. We employ best practices in mobile development and combine the best of creativity and technical knowhow. To know more about the possibilities with Xamarin development drop us an email at info@semaphore-software.com.