 Sachin Sharma
Founder, Dyulok
Technologies
After graduating from IIT Kanpur in 2006, Sachin spent 5 years in roles of software developer &am...
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 Now question is, does the current Mobile Applications scene offer that ideal scenario? In my opinion, it is still not there yet. Let's understand why. In many traditional software development cases, developers love platform-independent approaches because you write one piece of code, and deploy it on different places. That shoots down the development time and heavily cuts down the software maintenance costs. And for the same reason, there has been lots of buzz about platform-independent app development tools in current mobile development community. And yes, there has been a good progress, with tools like Phonegap etc coming into the scene. But still, why these emerging tools haven't been able to become the part of mainstream strategy in mobile app development? The reasons are many. Native app user experience! There is no platform independent solution that can replicate the native user experience in terms of finish and performance. Mobile users want their apps to be snap fast and readily respond to gestures. An app made with pure HTML5 won't support gestures and many features. An app made with a tool like Phonegap won't display that kind of performance. Rapidly changing APIs Mobile Operating Systems like Android/iOS only release their APIs in their own native programming language. With current fast paced world of mobile applications, every other day new features and sets of APIs keep hitting the scene. Platform Independent development tool providers find it difficult to keep pace with these quick enhancements. Not that much fragmentation If we look at latest trend and numbers, the Mobile OS has only two major players i.e. iOS and Android. These two account for majority of the smartphone market. So it can't be a bad approach to quickly develop individual native apps in each platform rather than going to build a common app with lot more effort, and also comprising on user experience. Hybrid approach Many a times, a hybrid approach would be the most effective one. The pages that are static in nature, and don't require too much user or server interaction can be made in something like HTML5. And same code can be used at other platforms. So in conclusion, in-spite of how much success platform-independent solutions may claim, it's still a long way to go before they become really powerful and start replacing app development in native languages. Experts on Mobile
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