5 Reasons to Embrace a Cross-Platform Mobile Architecture

Adopting a mobile-first approach and creating a seamless omnichannel customer experience are two of the biggest, most unstoppable business trends. However, many organisations are slow to adapt and still operate a range of native mobile applications and websites, all run by different teams on different technologies. Industry leaders are increasingly moving to a cross-platform mobile architecture. Adopting a consumer-first strategy and meeting the customer where they are has long been on the agenda for both growing enterprises and business leaders.

And yet, while many organisations are investing in an omnichannel approach to development, their web and mobile development platforms aren’t joined up due to disparate code bases, leading to inconsistent and slow features delivery, cost wastage, and a lack of innovation.

Moving to a cross-platform mobile architecture , which uses common tools and a single code base to replace native iOS/Android applications can help. This single code base can be extended to include web, making one single platform for all major frontend applications.

While omnichannel applications boast numerous benefits for customers, such as increased flexibility and a seamless user experience, the benefits of cross-platform mobile are even more wide reaching.

Companies are increasingly adopting a cross-platform mobile approach to application development to drive customer engagement and acquire new customers through loyalty programmes, personalisation, in-app notifications, and more.

In 2022, mobile applications can no longer be an afterthought, but instead should be core to your business’ consumer-first strategy. Find out more about how cross-platform app development is leading the way for enterprises seeking greater agility and innovation.

Adopting a cross-platform mobile architecture isn’t only good news for your users; from a development perspective, it’s far more efficient to maintain a single code base across web and mobile than to manage separate instances of each.

Using a thin frontend layer and lightweight components that are simple to use speeds up development and features delivery, enhancing agility and enabling organisations to get to market quicker.

Greater efficiency paves the way for increased innovation, too, since organisations can be more experimental and reactive to customers’ needs in an ever-evolving competitor landscape. A cross-platform approach enables businesses to widely reuse common components across applications, platforms and development teams. This can dramatically cut the time and cost associated with developing new applications and features. Related Read: Engineering End-to-End Velocity in the Cloud

As global economic uncertainty continues, operational business costs have once again been thrown under the spotlight. Managing disparate applications and code bases across web and mobile is undoubtedly more costly than adopting an all-in-one, cross-platform approach.

When it comes to innovation, your business can bring new concepts and features to the foreground and test them out in the real world without the significant upfront costs associated with specific mobile and web versions.

It’s also arguable that adopting a cross-platform approach to development helps with tech talent retention, since developers can deliver features more frequently and have greater ownership and impact across projects.

Adopting a cross-platform architecture isn’t only good news for your users and customers. It can have a dramatically positive impact on your DevEx (developer experience) , too.

Having a single code base for both web and mobile makes it easier for developers to experiment and bring features to market for testing quickly without significant upfront cost, maximising agility.

Saying goodbye to disparate web and mobile applications—and the complexities they bring—saves both time and money, which can be reinvested into activities that enhance the developer experience and benefit your business, such as greater training opportunities. Related Read: Making Omnichannel Work for TELUS Digital

The benefits of harnessing a cross-platform mobile architecture also extend to future developers within your organisation. Using platform-agnostic development tools (such as  React Native ) makes it easier for developers to come in and start making an impact from day one, instead of having to learn a whole new stack.

Having access to a readily available talent pool also provides your organisation with a significant advantage over competitors, enabling you to ramp up delivery and pivot fast in line with changes in the market.

Using a common digital stack and a cross-platform mobile architecture ultimately paves the way for greater speed and innovation—benefitting your users, developers, and your business alike. Click here to discover the key steps your business can take to embrace a ‘write once, deliver anywhere’ approach.