For many people interested in having a mobile app developed, one of their main goals is to reach the widest audience possible and have the biggest impact with their app. This impact might be different for others depending on their type of business. For example, a business app might be to provide coupons or access member plans, while a service or utility app might seek to provide a service in the app itself and provide utility directly; the goal itself is still to reach the widest number of people in regards to your business. If you are developing your app for one specific platform, you might be limiting the reach that your app can have. Developing an app with cross platform in mind can have the bonus of allowing your app to be used as a web app as well as a native phone app.
One for All
One benefit of working in a cross-platform development environment is that it allows you to reuse your code base, meaning that you can save time while developing the app. Because Android, web, and iOS normally use different programming languages, you will end up needing to develop every app from start each time you create for a new platform. The only thing that will be shared between platforms is the graphics and content that you use, but not the code base, meaning instead of building 1 app, you are really developing 2 or 3 different apps altogether. Reusing code means cutting down the time that you must spend slowly transforming each module into a whole other language. By cutting down the work you have to do, you can save time, resulting in quicker development time to get a beta app out, quicker to get feedback, quicker to implement changes, and quicker to ultimately get into the app store. When you are using a single script, you will save time and get your app out the door quicker.
Saving Costly Developers
This process of saving work and time also means that you are saving money. Since often time it is not the same developer that know both iOS programming (Cocoa language) and Android languages (Java), so to develop without developing cross-platform means that you need more than 1 developer to create your app. The fact that not every language has the same capability, something that might be easily done using one language, might be more difficult to do on another.
Rather than each app being different because it is built in a different language, you can have the same look between different platforms. Achieving this same look will not cost you development time, which also helps your brand maintain its design standards. The fact that it is uniform also means that when it comes time to push out updates, you will only have to develop the update one time, saving you both in development and in managing costs for the app.
