Smartphones are rapidly become the most common computing device in the world. In less than a decade they have gone from novelty to necessity. Many are estimating that 15 percent of the world will have a smartphone within three years. Tablets, such as the iPad, are now pushing there way onto the market and are competing in the same space. For app developers this is a dream come true. The mobile market has seen an incredible high level of diversity and competition amongst the various players. Google has made waves with its Android phones, and businesses still love their Blackberry’s. Apple is looking for new ways to restore itself and the iPhone to mobile dominance, and the news about the Verizon deal is probably only an initial step.

Developers of apps for these devices have mainly focused on developing for individual platforms. This can no longer be the case. Up until now it was really the only option because of the time and resources needed to build on multiple platforms. This has thus limited the size of the mobile app market and made it so developers can only reap from sales to a small percentage of the market. However, new tools are opening up the entire smartphone market to developers. This powerful ability is made possible with cross platform mobile development frameworks. Now all the endless time spent developing can be rewarded even more handsomely by building once and then deploying across every major smartphone platform.

Now developers have access to the entire smartphone market. What does this mean for mobile developers? First it means higher revenue. For the same amount of development time they now have access to a market that is four to five times bigger if not more depending on what platform they would otherwise specialize in. Second it means better apps for the consumer, which in turn broadens the user base and grows the size of the market. This increase in demand further increases the return developers can expect on any given app. So it is not difficult to see why many smartphone app developers are all starting to use cross platform frameworks.

The best part of developing cross platform smartphone apps has to be the incorporation of native features into the apps. Mobility was thought to be the main benefit of the mobile platform, but over time we have seen ever increasing functionality and gadgetry making smartphones increasingly powerful, useful, and fun. As these platforms become more robust, so will the applications that run on them. This pattern in the mobile market will no doubt mirror what we have seen in the desktop market over the last twenty years. A notable difference will be the prevalence of cross platform apps. Desktop developers have not had such a gift as mobile developers have, and it’s all due to the innovations of the mobile development platform and the cross platform framework.

Building apps on a cross platform framework will soon become the standard method of development. Already we have witnessed an increasing rate of adoption, and we can expect that it will continue to grow as more and more developers enter the market. We can also expect to see that those who were the early adopters are the ones who will be poised to profit the most from this innovation, and over time will be the ones cashing in on training and consulting. Since tens of thousands of developers around the world have already started to use some of the various cross platform development tools it would be good for all others to jump on the bandwagon very soon.

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