Cross Platform App Development Costs – How Much You Save?

Cross Platform app development tools like Titanium and PhoneGap are very popular with mobile app developers. According to a recent survey by VisionMobile, 23% of top developers use cross-platform app development tools.

Using their existing web knowledge to develop apps for multiple platforms. This allowed a large number of web developers to start developing apps for mobile. The developers had to just learn one software development kit. However, learning some platform-specific things is still essential. It allowed mobile startups and companies to create apps for different platforms at lesser costs.

Each platform has a unique set of tools and programming languages. An app written for Android cannot work on iOS and vice versa. This makes it very expensive for programmers, as they have to develop from scratch for each platform they have to support. This means more time and more resources making it expensive for developers and startups to support multiple platforms.

One of the reasons for using cross-platform tools for mobile development is to save costs.  If you are developing for one platform, there is almost no cost benefit. However, if you are developing multiple platforms, the cost-benefit increases with each platform you add.

We have extensively done cross-platform app development with PhoneGap and Titanium. We also have extensive experience in native app development as well.

Let's assume you plan to develop for iOS, Android,d and Windows,s and a native app costs you 10,000$ for these platforms. i.e. 10,000$ x 3 = 30,000$.

If you use a cross-platform tool, it would generally cost you around 70% less for each platform you add after the first platform. e.g. the same app might cost you 10,000$ + 3,000$ + 3,000$ = 16,000$. Please note these are just rough costs and depend on app-to-app and the tool you use to develop cross-platform apps.

‘Code Once, Use Everywhere’

Normally when developing cross-platform app development tools, many developers assume that they can create an app at the cost of one native app for all platforms. However, this assumption is wrong because of three main reasons:

1. Many platforms have their user interface guidelines and requirements. For this reason, you need to optimize the UI for each specific platform.
2. The APIs are different as well from platform to platform. Depending on what platform-specific features you are using, it would require you to code specifically for those platform-specific features
3. You will need to spend time testing each platform separately. With Android, this time increases further as you will probably need to test on a lot of different devices.