5 Cross-Platform Tools Used by Developers

Multi-national companies started to implement mobile apps and along with this came the need for multi-platform app publishing. A recent research by research2guidance revealed that are over 90 cross-platform tools (CP Tools) on the market split into 5 categories: App factories, Web App Toolkits, Cross-Platform Integrated Development Environments (CP IDE), CP IDE for enterprise, CP compilers and CP Cloud services.

The most used cross platform tools are Phone Gap, JQuery, Adobe Air, Qt Creator, and Unity 3D. The good news for them is that once developers have begun using a CP Tool, the majority use it as their main development platform; 63 % of CP Tool users develop more than 50% of their apps using a CP Tool. Most apps developed and published with the help of a CP Tool are for iOS and Android, with BlackBerry and Windows counting just in a small measure.

Most CP Tools in the research do not focus on particular industries, but the ones that do, are concentrated in “News and Media”, “Games” and “Retail”. Around 35% of CP Tool users have published a game, other popular categories being Utilities (22%), Business (21%), Education (20%) and Entertainment (19%).

Cut the Rope and World at War: Zombies were created using cross CP Tools, so they were able to meet the requirements for standards for user interface design, animation, device API integration and overall performance, but the research also showed that users still see app performances as the main weakness of CP Tools. 50% of all users rate the performance of the apps that are being developed by CP Tools considerably lower than their native counterparts. You can dive into the full report here, it’s free.