Mobile Development
implementing your ideas
Each experience is unique and tailored
Our team specializes in write once deploy anywhere technology. The advantages of write once technologies are obvious.
- Reduced upfront cost
- Reduced overall support cost
- Reduced time to market
- iOS/iPhone App Development
- Android App Development
To achieve our mobile application development strategy, we offer two options.
Write once, Run Everywhere, and be Native
Microsoft has released .NET Multi-platform App UI (.Net MAUI) to replace Microsoft Xamarin. MAUI builds off where Xamarin left off to deliver native apps using a .NET cross-platform UI.
Using a technology built on Microsoft’s .Net Framework called Xamarin. Xamarin was released in 2013 and purchased by Microsoft in 2016. Xamarin is currently used by more 1.4 million developers. “Xamarin is an open-source platform for building modern and performant applications for iOS, Android, and Windows with .NET. Xamarin is an abstraction layer that manages communication of shared code with underlying platform code.” – Microsoft.com
Read more about Xamarin: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/xamarin/get-started/what-is-xamarin
“.NET MAUI is open-source and is the evolution of Xamarin.Forms, extended from mobile to desktop scenarios, with UI controls rebuilt from the ground up for performance and extensibility. .NET MAUI unifies Android, iOS, macOS, and Windows APIs into a single API that allows a write-once run-anywhere developer experience, while additionally providing deep access to every aspect of each native platform. – Microsoft.com
Read more about .Net MAUI: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/maui/what-is-maui
The power of Xamarin and .NET MAUI
Both Xamarin and .Net MAUI enables developers to share an average of 90% of their application across platforms. The difference between the two and Hybrid is that they compile the application into the native language. This drastically lessens the UX impact and performance penalties while allowing the UI to be customized for each platform achieving greater comfortability when needed.
Pros
- Native performance / Native apps / Native UI
- Sharing 90% of code across platforms reduces the development life cycle
- Sharing code means less duplicate code prone to mistakes and differences
- Reduced cost and maintenance
- No JavaScript
- Best performance vs other cross-platform technologies
- Backed by Microsoft
Cons
- OS support lag – As platforms release updates and new features, the updates to the library of components can have some lag preventing those features from being implemented as fast as a native application. This is greatly reduced by the dedicated team at Xamarin backed by Microsoft.
Hybrid Applications
Hybrid applications are developed in Ionic. Created in 2013 as an open-source platform, Ionic uses a library of native components for iOS and Android. Ionic uses standard front-end technologies like, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and Angular. Using these technologies, Ionic helps to build cross-platform mobile applications featuring a single codebase.
Pros
- Minimal development team – A small development team can potentially be assembled to quickly produce simple applications for multiple platforms.
- Faster development cycle – Since the code is shared between platforms, the application can get to market faster.
Cons
- UX impact – The downside of a single code base is that the one-size-fits-all approach to UI design does not allow customizations so that the UI feels standard to the users of all platforms.
- OS support lag – As platforms release updates and new features, the updates to the library of components can have some lag preventing those features from being implemented as fast as a native application.
When to go native
Native development is still a great choice especially for heavy UI applications where sharing business logic is less prominent. The reason our team does not embrace this strategy is simply that we have found very few use cases where Xamarin is not the better option. When factoring in all the variables including significantly reduced cost of development and maintenance it always comes out on top. Because of this, our team has focused our expertise on the Xamarin platform so that we can deliver those applications to the top of our ability.
Reach out to our experts today to receive a free consultation and see the advantages for your organization.