Guidelines on choosing between native and cross platform development : A comparative study on the efficiency of native and cross-platform mobile development

Sammanfattning: The first decision in an application development project is choosing the application development platform. Until recently, native application development was the dominant development platform used. The recent increase in popularity of cross-platform development has made this decision to choose between native and cross platform development platforms even more difficult. There is a problem of a lack of guidelines on choosing between native and cross platform development. This lack of guidelines can lead companies to incur costs since application development is a time and money intensive process. The purpose of the thesis is to provide guidelines on when to choose between native application development and cross platform development. This thesis utilized qualitative methods to perform a comparative analysis between native and cross platform development. This analysis was done by building a weather application using native platform development and Flutter, which is the cross-platform development tool we have chosen. We used five comparative criteria to perform the comparative analyses. The results of the thesis are the set of guidelines that are obtained by performing a comparative analysis between native and cross platform development using five comparative criteria. These results will aid people involved in the application development process in making an informed decision of what development platform to use.