It’s the classic conundrum to choose between the jack of all trades or the ace of one. Mobile apps, these days have become a critical component of all businesses irrespective of industry. No, we aren’t necessarily talking about those businesses who build mobile apps as a source of revenue but those that deploy them for their internal operations.

But when any business decides to build an application, they face a very tricky problem- to choose between native and cross-platform. While we won’t get into the debate, it is worth pointing out their key promises:

What Native apps offer:

•     Best performance
•     Excellent stability
•     Timely updates
•     Best User experience

What cross-platform apps offer:

•     Low cost
•     Quick development
•     Portability

Now depending on key business requirements, they have to make some tradeoffs. If they want excellent performance, they can either achieve it by investing more or compromising on a bit of user experience. For enterprise mobile solutions, the requirements are a bit different than other businesses:

Efficiency over aesthetics

Because enterprise apps do not have to be marketed or appeal to consumers, they can easily afford to compromise a bit on the user interface and experience in favor of improved performance. That is, if eliminating a few animations and graphical effects can make any process a few microseconds faster, consumer applications would hesitate but enterprise applications won’t.

Portability is critical

Any large enterprise with thousands of employees can’t dictate what devices they should use. And for that reason, their ecosystem would have all kinds of mobile platforms- something their application must support. So while reaching out to different mobile platforms is a matter of choice for consumer apps, it is something that enterprise apps must support from day one.

Cost

Unlike consumer apps that have virtually limitless revenue potential, enterprise apps don’t directly make money. Their cost is actually compensated by the increased efficiency and productivity they bring to the business processes. So if the cost of the application is too high, it simply doesn’t make any business sense to deploy them in the first place.

If you closely look at all their preferences, you would see that their requirements expand to both native and cross-platform domains.

Enter Xamarin

A product of Microsoft, Xamarin is possibly one of the finest tools to build native apps keeping the precise needs of enterprises in mind. What makes it different from other popular platforms like React Native is while they focus on delivering the best UI/UX, Xamarin is more fixated on performance- which as mentioned earlier is a favorite for enterprises. If we get down to the specifics,

Xamarin is excellent at code sharing. In ideal cases, more than 90% of the code can be shared across different platforms. This means enterprises can build native apps for each platform- and reap all its benefits, at the cost and time of cross-platform apps.

One of the key problems of cross-platform apps is that they can’t use native libraries and thus miss out on device-specific hardware features. Xamarin app development passes that hurdle by converting the native libraries of Android and iOS for its own platform. So, if you use Xamarin to build a native app for Android or iOS, you will be using the actual native APIs and all the benefits that come with it. There is, however, one caveat here- the native APIs don’t immediately come to Xamarin after their lunch and it might be a few months before Xamarin developers can actually benefit from the latest updates.

Xamarin comes with a large collection of built-in pages, templates, buttons, and other components. Plus along with the native libraries of Android and iOS, Xamarin development can also leverage the vast resources of Java, C#, Objective-C, and more.

Overall, for businesses who understand the complexities involved in enterprise apps, Xamarin app development remains their preferred choice. This is because the platform has been built from the ground up keeping enterprise mobile applications in mind- thus helping enterprises evade the tough choice of choosing between native and cross-platform by providing them the benefits of both.