Before building a mobile app, you choose between two broad approaches: native apps written separately for iOS and Android, or cross-platform apps that share most code across both.
Native development
Native apps use Swift for iOS and Kotlin for Android. They have first-class access to every device feature, the best performance and an experience that matches each platform's conventions. The trade-off is building and maintaining two codebases.
Cross-platform development
React Native and Flutter let one team build for both platforms from mostly shared code. This lowers cost and speeds delivery, and modern frameworks reach near-native performance for most business apps. Highly specialised features may still need native modules.
Side-by-side
- Cost: cross-platform is typically lower because one team and codebase serve both platforms.
- Time to market: cross-platform is usually faster.
- Performance: native leads for graphics-heavy, AR or very low-latency work.
- Device access: native has day-one access to new OS features; cross-platform may lag slightly.
- Maintenance: one codebase is easier to keep consistent.
- Look and feel: native follows platform conventions automatically; cross-platform needs care to feel at home on each.
How to choose
Choose cross-platform for most business, marketplace, booking, content and IoT companion apps. Choose native for games, advanced camera or sensor processing, deep OS integration, or when platform-specific polish is the product.
Do not forget the back end
Whichever route you take, the app depends on secure APIs, authentication, data storage and push notifications. Plan the back end and the app together, so features ship end to end.