One codebase
Not every phone app needs to be built natively. Plenty of products do not lean on the platform underneath them enough to justify paying for two separate codebases.
Cross platform app development gives you a single codebase serving both Android and iOS. One team, one set of features, and one place where a bug gets fixed. That keeps the maintenance overhead lower for the whole life of the app, which usually matters more than what you save on the first build.
So if your app does not depend on platform specific design conventions, or on the sensors and hardware inside the phone, cross platform is the option for you. Our cross platform mobile app development services cover both stores from one build.
Part of our full mobile app development services.
Who builds it
Choosing cross platform is one decision. Choosing who builds it is the next one. A single codebase serving both stores means everything runs through one team, so the choice of team carries more weight than it would on a project split across two.
When you hire us as your cross platform app development company, the code and the IP are yours from the start. There is no proprietary platform you have to keep paying for, and nothing stopping another team picking the project up later if you decide to bring it in house.
We also stay on it after launch. Both app stores change their requirements, Android and iOS ship new versions every year, and a cross platform app has to keep up with both. That ongoing work is easy to overlook while you are comparing quotes, so it is worth asking cross platform application development companies what happens after the app goes live.
When a project really needs the platform underneath it, we build native iOS and native Android too.
Frameworks
There are three routes to a cross platform app, and the right one depends on what your product has to do rather than which framework we happen to prefer.
Flutter is Google's UI toolkit, written in a language called Dart. It draws every pixel itself instead of handing off to the platform's own components, which gives you precise control over how the app looks and keeps it consistent everywhere it runs. If your app leans on heavy animation, has to feel identical across platforms, or is likely to want a desktop version later, Flutter app development is usually the right call. It is also what our open source boilerplate is built in, so it is the stack we spend the most time in.
React Native is the better fit when the web matters. It is built on React, so a team that already writes React can read and maintain the mobile app, and a good amount of logic can be shared with a web product. Expo adds over the air updates on top of that, which means JavaScript level bug fixes can reach users without waiting on an app store review.
That also makes React Native app development the natural choice if you plan to start on the web. If the first version is a progressive web app and the phone app comes later, staying inside the React ecosystem makes that a continuation rather than a rebuild, and Expo gives you the native device features when you get there.
Hybrid sits below both. A hybrid app is a web app running inside a native shell, usually Ionic or Capacitor. It is the cheapest way onto both stores and a reasonable choice for content driven apps or for wrapping a web product you already have. Hybrid app development struggles once you need heavy animation, real offline behaviour, or deep hardware access, so we will tell you plainly when it is not enough.
Our process
A cross platform build runs with one team and one backlog. A feature gets written once and lands on both platforms in the same release, so you are not waiting for Android to catch up with iOS, or explaining to users why the two versions behave differently.
Sharing a codebase does not mean shipping the same screen twice. Navigation, back behaviour, typography, and the standard controls all differ between iOS and Android, so every release gets a platform specific pass before it goes out. That is the work that stops a cross platform app feeling generic on both.
Testing covers both sides as well. The same build behaves differently on an iPhone than it does on a mid range Android phone, so we test on real devices from each platform rather than assuming one result covers the other.
Then there are two submissions instead of one. Apple and Google have different requirements, different review processes, and different timelines, so they rarely approve on the same day. We plan releases around that, which means either both versions go live together or you decide up front that one ships ahead of the other. That coordination is part of our cross platform mobile development services rather than something that starts once the build is finished.
Tell us which platforms you need and how fast you need them. We will recommend Flutter, React Native, or hybrid based on what your app actually does, then give you one timeline that covers both app stores.