Native Mobile App Development

For native application, the developer uses a programming language and an integrated development environment designed specifically to produce applications for the platform.

There are currently two dominant native operating system platforms for mobile devices:

• iOS from Apple
• Android from Google

For iOS, the native programming languages are Objective-C and Swift, and the integrated development environment is called Xcode and is available only on Apple Mac computers.

For Android, the native language is a variant of Java specific to Android or Kotlin, and the main integrated development environment is called Android Studio, though there are also other possibilities including Eclipse. Android Studio is available for both Apple Mac computers and for Microsoft Windows based PCs.

There are many advantages in developing native mobile applications.

• The platform is developed, maintained, and promoted by the providers
• Immediately able to take advantage of latest features and capabilities when they are released
• Performance and speed
  

There are also several disadvantages to developing native mobile applications:

• Application can only run on that platform
• Scarcity of developers skilled in native development
• Additional costs of supporing multiple platforms and tool chains