Cross-platform app development has become a necessity heading into 2025, where the expectations of mobile users are ever-increasing. Research shows that cross-platform developers are on the rise, with Flutter and React Native being the dominant frameworks.
The growing demand for frictionless user experiences across multiple operating systems, in part driven by a more diverse market, has made cross-platform development more exploited for businesses seeking market expansion.
However, an efficient development processes with sophisticated UX/UI design becomes more tricky with cross-platform design, and over half of users are understood to not recommend businesses with poorly designed mobile interfaces. Because the strategy has become so popular, outsourcing services have become prolific and economical.
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Leading Companies in the Field
TXI – Chicago’s Innovation Leader
Based in Chicago, TXI has established itself for over two decades now as a premier cross-platform development agency. The team specializes in creating synchronized applications across multiple platforms (i.e., not just targeting different device user bases), with a particular expertise in manufacturing and healthcare sectors. The company’s approach is the typical one of the industry, to combine cloud infrastructure development with strategic mobile solutions. This allows organizations to scale effectively while maintaining consistent user experiences.
Flatirons – Boulder’s Technical Powerhouse
Operating from Boulder, Colorado, Flatirons has distinguished itself through specialized cross-platform development using React Native and Flutter frameworks – the two most prominent frameworks within the industry. Their comprehensive service portfolio includes IoT integration and robust backend services utilizing Ruby on Rails and AWS infrastructure. The company’s design philosophy centers on creating intuitive, high-performance applications that seamlessly operate across iOS and Android platforms.
UX Divers – Modern Design Solutions
UX Divers has carved out a unique position in the market by focusing on comprehensive UI control libraries and templates for cross-platform development. Their expertise in .NET MAUI and XAML has resulted in successful implementations across various sectors, making them a flexible service. The company’s portfolio includes innovative projects in sustainable agriculture and historical tourism applications, demonstrating their versatility across many industries and customer demands.
Work & Co – Design Excellence
Work & Co approaches mobile development through a human-centered design methodology, emphasizing rapid prototyping and multi-platform optimization. Their expertise extends to voice interface development and complex system integration – this ultimately allows them to deliver solutions that work seamlessly across different platforms.
The technical capabilities of these companies are almost certainly stronger than an any newly appointed in-house team, one or asked to adapt to a new challenge. They have robust workflows and lots of experiencing these projects, and most will make promises around maintenance that they keep.
There is also the option of going local, but the choices are more limited. In-person meetings can bring some benefit, not to mention in-person training that may be offered to help become more self-sufficient with new systems.
Technical Deep Dive
As previously mentioned, React Native and Flutter lead the market in 2024. React Native enables developers to write modules in Objective-C, Swift or Java while still maintaining native-like performance on any device. The framework’s have an extensive amount of community support by now, and this is what is creating friction in moving away from them towards newer frameworks. The code editor availability makes it particularly attractive for enterprise applications, too.
Modern UI/UX practices certainly emphasize mobile-first design principles in this market, with the majority of web browsing, e-commerce, and even games being played on mobile. This means accessibility and performance optimization are at the forefront, but with only Android and iOS to contend with, it makes it more manageable.
Minimalistic design approaches continue to dominate (in the West, not so much in Asia), focusing on consistency across platforms while maintaining brand identity. Performance optimization too, as users expect fast-loading, intuitive animations, and so on. Long gone are the days of accepting awkward web apps on Tablets that lack responsive design.
AI and machine learning have something to say in this space, too, as they’re being introduced to testing and quality assurance protocols – helping automate the process and highlighting yet another economies of scale. Developers are also employing adaptive software development methodologies that foresee quick changes to requirements, with regular updates also becoming a higher expectation among users, not to mention it making the collaorative design and iterative process much faster.
Final Word
Looking forward, we may see more AI-powered UI design tools, though we are quite far away from text-to-development (which would allow low-code directors to generate products with simple language prompts). Instead, they’re being used as tools to speed up the development process by developers, in particular with automated testing.
Cloud integration has of course become standard, while industry in general is witnessing some small shifts toward interoperability, and even metaverse interoperability, with cross-platform solutions increasingly supporting AR and VR capabilities – though this is still in its infancy.
Ultimately, the economics of using a product design specialist has only increased in viability despite the rise of low-code solutions. While low-code and non-technical websites are certainly rife, the same can’t be said for app development.
