Also known as: Mobile app development, Mobile development, App development
Mobile app development is building software for smartphones and tablets, and it comes in three broad flavors.1
Overview
The first is native: code written for one platform alone, with full hardware access and the best performance — Swift for iOS, Kotlin or Java for Android. The second is cross-platform: a shared codebase that runs on both, such as Flutter or React Native (the latter built on JavaScript). The third is the PWA, or progressive web app — a website that behaves like an installed app.
Trade-offs
The three trade off reach against depth. Native gives the deepest hardware access and smoothest performance but doubles the work to cover both platforms. Cross-platform writes once and ships everywhere at some cost in polish and native-feature access. A PWA is the lightest to build and needs no app store, but runs inside the browser’s limits. The build work itself happens on a personal computer; the phone or tablet is the target.
Sources
-
Mobile app development — Wikipedia, on native, cross-platform, and web approaches. ↩