Perfect tool. This topic comes from the article that I wrote called "Xamarin, the best mobile application development solution for you?" where we talk about this tool from different areas. Although we clarify many doubts, we do not mention the parameters to be taken into account when choosing a specific tool that suits our needs.
How to know what is the perfect tool for you in the mobile development world?
Before we can know if one or another tool is suitable for what we need, or want, we must first evaluate the following criteria:
- Times / Cost of development
- Learning curve
- Human resources available in the market
- Quality of the application
- Advantages and disadvantages of tools
Below we will detail each one of these criteria based on the analyzes and investigations previously done.
Evaluation criteria
Times / Cost of development
The cross-platform's applications in this section have an advantage to be able to save from 30-70% the costs and development times of an application.
For native applications the fact of having to develop a version for each platform causes them to be in the worst position at this point, because they triple the cost of development.
Learning curve
Compared to native the learning curve is supposed to be less painful for cross-platform's applications. Native applications require learning about the three platforms, technology, tools and so on.
Human resources available in the market
According to PacktPub's "Skill Up 2018" E-book statistics, most of the developers are Back / Front-end and Full-stack. These combined are more than 70%. This is the reason why web technologies have their popularity.
Mobile developers are only about 12%. More than 60% of these developers are native and more than 30% are cross-platform.
These statistics may vary depending on the location. However, here is something very interesting that I have noticed. Although mobile applications's developers with web technology outnumber .net developers (in this case) professionally at the business level Xamarin outnumbers other cross-platform development tools in terms of users.
With this I don't say that one tool is worse or better than another one. It's good to know that Xamarin's ideology is based on business environments.
App Quality
The App's quality should be analyzed from two perspectives:
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User experience
The UX depends on factors of design, usability, interaction, accessibility and visual quality; as well as factors such as emotions, brand building and transmission, reliability, etc. It is definitely something that goes far beyond the development tool.
Here the native and generated applications have the advantage because their use is natural and immediate with the controls and transitions. In the case of hybrid applications, this must be simulated, and for that reason is one step behind.
-
Performance
The final application performance will be defined mainly by the general solution architecture and the intelligent use of the server-client business logic.
At the component level, with the tools's advances in recent years the difference is almost minimal. The end user almost doesn't perceive these changes.
Advantages and disadvantages of the tools
Advantages and disadvantages have all tools, everybody knows that. And everything will depend on what you want to do or what is needed for your case.
The most normal are CRUD applications. These are applications whose main function is to create, read, update and delete. In this case, cross-platform development is the best option.
Unless we have to use very low level things like interacting with the touch screen while we use the camera to show images in 3 dimensions. In this case, native applications are the best option. Although multiplatform applications are already achieving great results with low-level functionalities.
Conclusion
The technology, platform or programming language are not interesting for most of the companies that are looking for a mobile application for their business. They only focus on the final product, and if they can get it at with a competitive cost more better, right?
However, developers or companies that are dedicated to the mobile applications's development have to consider these factors mentioned above. You have to look for that perfect tool. "By 2022, 70% of the interactions with systems in companies will be on mobile devices." a man said whose name is Gartner. This is because the way in which the human being communicates is changing with mobility.
To take advantage of this, we developers need a perfect tool that saves us working time, makes us more efficient and allows us to launch products of higher quality.
As I mentioned in some of my articles, in the end the decision between a tool or platform should be based on your skills and knowledge. So, if you are looking for references, are new or are trying to start in the mobile development's world now you know what you need to make a wise decision. Hope you can find your perfect tool.
See you next time!
Thank you somuch for reading this post!
Good Job! As you said learning curve is really important because at the end time is a investment and we must spend time learning something that really increase our productivity.
Regards,
I was able to learn a lot of new and unknown things from your article and it is precisely because of this that I have several interesting options for me at once.