Cost may be perceived as a barrier to using cross-platform development tools, but only 5 percent of developers believe creating a native app is a better way to go, according to Research2Guidance. The Berlin-based research firm released its 2014 Cross-Platform Tool Benchmarking Report last month and offers a comparison of 40 different products.
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The vast majority, 81 percent, of tool users are satisfied with the use of a Cross-Platform Tool (CPT) for app development and rate their tool's cost-performance as "good value" or "OK value."
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23 percent of actual users state monetary costs might act as a barrier to the growth of the Cross-Platform Tool market.
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32 percent of the actual users say that concerns about the resulting app's quality is what constitutes the major barrier to the growth of the CPT market.
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28 percent of CPT users needed only days and 40 percent weeks to reach an expert user level.
"The argument that Cross-Platform Tools are too expensive to use does not withstand the reality check," the report says. "Anyhow, costs are just one decision factor for or against the adoption of a Cross-Platform Tool. Some other decision criteria are: familiarization time with a tool, quality of output, support, etc."
The overall satisfaction of cross-platform development tools is a positive sign, particularly considering how crowded this market has become, a fact Research2Guidance notes in its report. The benchmark study also shows that while CPT tools may be increasingly oriented toward enterprise apps, the majority of use cases, or 73 percent, are for app projects with a short time span of three months or less, which means that as consumer app or mobile game developers become more comfortable with them, there will be plenty of opportunity to accelerate build cycles.
For more:
- download the benchmark study here
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