Cross-Platform Tools: Developers have a high willingness to use but low awareness of the available options

Cross-platform tools are designed to accelerate the mobile app development process and overcome OS and device fragmentation. With the help of a well-designed and appropriate cross-platform tool, developers are able to save time and money in mobile app development. However, amongst the developer community there is rather low awareness of the available solutions as well as lack of knowledge about the possibilities of these tools.

A major barrier for the success of cross-platform tools lies in the identification of the proper tool by potential users. Non-users mostly name the following factors to be important for the choice of a tool: “number of supported platforms” (70%), “performance” of the tool (64 %), “cost of the cross-platform tool” (62%), and “development time and cost” (59%). Thus, the lack of knowledge about strengths and weaknesses of cross-platform tools is the main barrier for their usage.

Lack of knowledge about possibilities of cross-platform tools

According to these criteria, developers who are using cross-platform tools rate them positively in general: 84% are satisfied with the number of supported platforms and 67% say the tool helps them to save 30% time and more. The license costs for using a cross-platform tool did not exceed costs of US$ 5,000  in 79% of the observed cases. Only the performance of apps built with cross-platform tools was criticized by 44%.
These findings are part of our global survey “Cross-Platform App Development Tool Benchmarking”. In this survey we ask mobile developers to compare cross-platform tools to pure native app development. The comparison contains amongst others costs, complexity, result quality, and development speed of the different approaches. The results of the survey will be published in a comprehensive report in summer 2013. So far more than 800 developers participated and 80 solutions are represented.
The survey is still open. We invite you to participate. To take the survey, please click here: (survey is closed)

Please note: These are preliminary results of an on-going survey. The final results will be published in summer 2013.

UPDATE: Our  Cross-Platform Benchmarking 2013  report is finished. You can  download it for free.