What Technologies to Choose for Developing Your Application?

Dmytro Sikorskyi, Owner, CEO, 16 October 2023

In this video, we will tell you what to pay attention to when choosing technologies for developing your application, so that you can spend your time and money most effectively.

The choice of technologies for developing your application will likely be made by your development team, but I would still advise paying attention to this aspect to spend time and money most effectively.

What aspects are important to you as a client when choosing technology for the project? First and foremost, it’s the speed and cost of development and future growth. This is understandable. Second, it’s the speed and efficiency of the application itself, as it affects user experience. And third, it’s the popularity of the technology and the trend of its popularity, which determines the development cost in the future and how easy or difficult it will be to find the right people in a year or five years.

Essentially, there are two main options:

1. Use “native” technologies for each platform. I mean Android, iOS, macOS, Linux, Windows, and web.
2. Use cross-platform technologies.

“Native” Technologies

For each platform, there are “native” technologies for application development. For example, for Android, it’s Java, for iOS, it’s Swift or Objective C (the latter, by the way, is outdated).

These technologies allow you to use the device’s and operating system’s capabilities and resources most efficiently. This affects the speed and smoothness of your application’s performance, as well as factors like battery consumption during use.

However, since you essentially develop a separate application for each platform, test it separately, fix bugs, and add new features in the future, this option requires significantly more time and money.

Cross-Platform Technologies

The main advantage of cross-platform technologies is significantly higher development speed and much lower costs, compared to the previous option. You develop one application that, with minor adaptations, can work on different platforms. This also optimizes the team, as there is no need to search for separate specialists for each platform (although this depends on the complexity of your project).

Today, there are three main competitors: Flutter, React Native, and Xamarin. Although I love Microsoft products, I would not consider Xamarin as it has the least popularity, and it continues to decline.

Choosing between Flutter and React Native, I personally prefer Flutter. It’s a Google product, more efficient, works faster, has better development tools, but React is also an excellent framework for developing applications for different platforms. Here, you can choose based on the technology your team is accustomed to.

How to Make the Choice

In short, for most projects that do not require maximum speed and efficiency in utilizing system resources and do not require specific interaction with operating systems and hardware, the best choice, in my opinion, is either Flutter or React Native. This way, you spend time and money effectively, developing one application for different devices that works well.

Flutter and React Native are suitable for various business applications, accounting systems, CRMs, social networks, applications for stores, restaurants, etc.

If every percentage of device speed is important to you (especially important for applications that must work even on very old devices or, for example, deal with heavy video, graphics, like YouTube), then native development tools for each platform separately are probably more suitable. However, it’s worth noting that this difference is often not visible to the naked eye.

That’s it. I hope this was helpful. If you have any questions on this topic, please feel free to ask, and we’ll be happy to help.