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.
Which flavor a team picks turns on how much they value reach against depth, and how much duplicated work they can afford. The build work itself always happens on a personal computer; the phone or tablet is only the deployment target, tested against emulators and physical devices.
Comparing the approaches
The three trade reach against depth in a fairly clean way:
| Approach | Codebases | Hardware access | Performance | App store |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Native | One per platform | Full | Best | Yes |
| Cross-platform | One shared | Most | Very good | Yes |
| PWA | One (web) | Limited | Good | Not required |
Native gives the deepest access and smoothest feel but doubles the work; a PWA is lightest and store-free but lives inside the browser’s limits; cross-platform sits in between.
Where it fits
Mobile app development is how the client side of a mobile experience gets built — including a lightweight front end for viewing data a server produces. A GopherTrunk decoder typically exposes a web console, so the simplest “app” for checking it from a phone is a PWA pointed at that console; a native or cross-platform app would only be worth the effort if it needed deeper device features like background notifications. The heavy decoding stays on the capture node, not the handset.
Sources
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Mobile app development — Wikipedia, on native, cross-platform, and web approaches. ↩