Whether to opt for native development or cross-platform is a question as old as the major mobile platforms themselves. Yet it continues to vex clients on the verge of their next app project even in 2023.

Native app development leverages development tools provided by the platform vendors themselves (Objective C and Swift for iOS, Java and Kotlin for Android) and requires creating and maintaining separate code bases for both platforms. From the quest for a single code base emerged hybrid app development (web apps with native elements) and cross-platform development (apps with with shareable and reusable code).

With tools like Flutter, React Native, and Xamarin catapulting cross-platform development to new heights (read: shorter learning cycle, significant cost savings, wide community support), product owners are genuinely puzzled. Should they go cross-platform or native?

Let’s find out the answers today.

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The new architecture recommendation from Google is changing how we build Android apps. The architecture separates UI and data into distinct layers, with an optional “domain” layer in between. It doesn’t have a specific name like MVVM and is instead referred to as the “new architecture” or “layered architecture.” 

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Jetpack Compose, the much-awaited UI toolkit from Google, is finally production-ready. With the power and flexibility of the declarative UI paradigm and access to low-level animation APIs, it is about to take the Android developer experience to a whole new level. 

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In the dynamic realm of Android app development, it is not uncommon for new libraries, SDKs, and architectures to rise and fall and new features to get added or removed each year. Among the few things to survive the flux, the XML-based UI toolkit is relied on by developers to build user interfaces of all kinds. It is a bit of a tedious process: UI layouts are defined in an XML file, accessed and processed inside Kotlin files.

That normal is now slowly changing. Declarative and reactive UI toolkits and frameworks are shaking things up. 

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