India’s leading electronics and mobile manufacturing association, ICEA, has conducted a study to understand the key drivers of the choice of platform for app development.

The study shows that developers’ choice of platform is driven by 5 key parameters – target audience, market share, scalability requirements, budget and development timeline. There is no evidence of technological barriers affecting developer preferences.

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With the proliferation of the app economy, developers are posed with a critical decision when building their apps – to choose the platforms/Operating System (OS) on which they wish to deploy their apps for maximum efficiency.

Further, the study shows that developers did not face any difficulty on portability of the apps between various Oss. In fact, they could do so at negligible or no cost.

According to the study, developers opt either for Native or Cross-platform development of apps. Native development refers to the creation of apps for a specific platform such as Android which has 95.79 per cent market share in India or iOS. It allows developers to create a more customised user-experience. Cross-platform development involves apps that can be deployed on various platforms with only one codebase.

The research highlighted that start-ups prefer Cross-platform development to reach a wider audience quickly and efficiently.

However, as businesses grow and gain deeper insights into their customers, respondents to the study highlighted that they may either continue with Cross-platform development or transition to Native development for a more tailored and platform-specific experience.

Today, Cross-platform frameworks have matured and are effective competitors to Native platforms providing developers an array of options.

Regardless of the chosen approach, customers are the ultimate beneficiaries enjoying high quality apps seamlessly operating on their preferred platforms – whether Android or iOS – without noticeable differences in performance/functionality, according to the study.

ICEA represents a vast range of global and Indian smartphone brands in India that offer mobile platforms to over 800 million customers in India. Its members include Oppo, Vivo, Google, Apple, Wistron, Pegatron, Dixon, Lava and Bharat FIH, amongst others.

The global app market has experienced a boom in growth, with a projected CAGR of 8.58 per cent till 2027 and 11.28 per cent for the Indian app economy. This has provided significant opportunities of growth for developers.