5 best cross-platform development tools for your next project

Over the last few years or so the market for enterprise-ready mobile cross-platform development has begun to make some space. The necessity for developing and deploying mobile applications rapidly at a good scale suggests that in the coming future the cross-platform development tools will not only be used widely but also be one of the core parts of the development of an app for all size of companies.

A premier global market intelligence firm – IDC did research and forecasted that the market for cross-platform app development platforms will see an annual growth rate of 38% reaching 5 billion (Approx.) by 2017.

The value is obvious as we can see the growing number of investments and acquisitions in the enterprise mobile development world. RedHat acquiring FeedHenry for around $82 million and Xamarin raising record-breaking investment.

List of best cross-platform development tools

Here’s an effort to acknowledge our readers about the 5 best cross-platform app development tools for Enterprises:

1) Sencha

Sencha offers a variety of cross-platform application development tools such as Sencha Architect, Sencha Animator, and more. Ext JS 5 is the main product by Sencha for enterprise developers who can create HTML5 apps, which can be transformed into native apps. The platform is priced at $3,225 per year for up to five developers.

Technology Used: HTML5

2) Xamarin

Xamarin has been exponentially expanding and strengthening itself and generated a record-breaking investment of $54m to flourish more. Since the Xamarin 2 release, it has provided a new cross-platform IDE, Xamarin Studio making the development of apps easier.

Xamarin 2 gives developers instant access to a range of free and paid pre-built libraries & user interface controls with a cheesy pricing model which starts from free. Business subscriptions start at $83 per month. Xamarin has also established enterprise partnerships with IBM, Xoriant, and Microsoft.

Technology Used: Objective-C, Java, C, and C++ Interop

3) MobileFirst by IBM

IBM MobileFirst Platform is a mobile enterprise application platform that supports the development of HTML5, hybrid and native mobile applications. The MobileFirst Studio is the platform’s integrated development environment.

It allows mobile developers to make full use of all existing HTML5 functionality as well as further enhance these capabilities with utilities and mechanisms required by modern organizations such as encryption of locally stored data, offline authentication, combined HTML5 and native coding, 3rd-party library integration with frameworks such as Sencha Touch, Jquery, etc.

Technology Used: Native iOS (Objective-C), Native Android (Java), J2ME, C# native Windows Phone (C#), and JavaScript

4) Ionic

Ionic is one of the most encouraging HTML 5 mobile application frameworks. It is built using SASS, it provides many UI components to help develop a rich and interactive application. It uses the JavaScript MVVM framework, AngularJS to power apps. Two-way data binding, interaction with backend services and APIs makes AngularJS a mobile developer’s common choice.

The Ionic team mainly focuses on the look and feel, and UI interaction of an application building. Ionic is an open-source SDK released under a permissive MIT license. This means you can use Ionic in your own personal or commercial projects for free.

Technology Used: HTML5 & Angular js.

5) Appcelerator Titanium

Appcelerator is an open-source mobile app development framework that provides an environment to create native apps for several mobile platforms using JavaScript and it not only lets you create your app but also lets you analyze the developed mobile application.

Technology Used: JavaScript

Final Words

Be aware to know that the cross-platform app development isn’t as simple as it feels to be. Writing the code and putting it through the tool and publishing different applications for respective app stores is not as it seems to be.

Though using the cross-platform development tools can definitely reduce the cost and time associated with any project but on the front of UI extensive work needs to be done to be updated in accordance with different systems. So, what are your plans for switching to a cross-platform development tool? Are you ready to use one of the cross-platform app development tools?