How Alibaba Leveraged Cross-Platform Development to Reach Millions

In today’s digital world, business conglomerates are constantly in search of the most effective and efficient approach to embark on new operations and touch as large an audience as possible. As it is now a mobile-first era, the most effective policy being adopted by companies toward achieving this objective is cross-platform mobile app development, which allows them to get closer to their desired objectives at minimal development time and cost. A perfect example of this is Alibaba, the e-commerce giant.

Cross-Platform Mobile App Development: What is it?

Let's get our feet wet on the basics before delving into how Alibaba used cross-platform app development. Cross-platform mobile app development enables developers to write an application in one codebase, with the possibility of deploying it on many platforms, including Android and iOS, and sometimes even on web browsers. That contrasts with native app development where each operating system has its different codebases.

Cross-platform mobile applications are developed using frameworks such as Flutter, React Native, and Xamarin. These frameworks help develop an app that can be shown to be natively built on any device while reducing the share of the codebase, saving developers time and money that would have otherwise been spent in maintaining different apps on each platform.

Alibaba Transitioning to Cross-Platform Mobile Apps

With over a billion users, Alibaba is one of the largest e-commerce sites in the world, which requires a completely seamless user experience across all devices and operating systems. Initially, native apps were developed for both Android and iOS during the early days of Alibaba; however, as the business scaled, it was getting extremely expensive and time-consuming to maintain two codebases.

By using Flutter, Google's UI toolkit, Alibaba developed the cross-platform application to overcome these challenges. This shift has helped Alibaba build three major successes as follows:

• Developed Unified Development Experience: Developers at Alibaba can now write the core logic of the app only once and deploy it everywhere. It saved time for the team to hone in on the refinement of the user experience.

• Consistency Across Platforms: By cross-platform, Alibaba made sure that functionality and look-and-feel would be the same across any device so it guaranteed user experience to be consistent with the platform.

• Scalability: With cross-platform development, Alibaba could scale the app and maintain control over one codebase, which eased updates and new features, thereby speeding up growth.

Benefits Alibaba Gained Through Cross-Platform Development

1. Cost-Effective
   One of the biggest benefits of cross-platform development is that it minimizes the cost. Most enterprise mobile application development companies charge for any native development on different platforms. The cross-platform platforms enabled Alibaba to almost dramatically decrease its cost of development and maintenance without the need to support any separate application on iOS and Android.

2. Time-to-market
   The e-commerce industry is somewhat competitive, and timing is quite crucial. Through cross-platform development, Alibaba was able to develop features much faster and launch its app sooner to the market. Developers did not have to create separate versions for each platform; instead, they could work on creating a release that could be used by all platforms simultaneously.

3. Broader Coverage of Audience
   The cross-platform mobile applications helped Alibaba reach millions of users. The app was not solely dependent on one platform but available to all customers through Android, iOS, and the web. This matters more in emerging markets where people have a variety of devices and operating systems in use.

4. Efficient Maintenance
   Natively, each platform has to be updated and bugs fixed separately, which results in increased workload for the development team. However, with the cross-platform framework, Alibaba could save time to maintain and update its apps by keeping efficiency high.

Challenges Faced by Alibaba in Cross-Platform Development

1. Performance Issue
   The main drawback of cross-platform applications is that performance is typically a problem. Native applications are usually optimized for their respective platforms. It was quite challenging for Alibaba to ensure that the cross-platform version of its application performed as smoothly as it did in native versions, especially in things like complex animations or heavy computations.

2. Consistency of UI/UX
   Cross-platform development was supposed to make sure the application fulfilled every single criterion, at least for those on a couple of major operating systems without necessarily letting there be minute differences about how the app behaves when both are using their operating system. For Alibaba, the application would have had to comply with Android and iOS's UI/UX standards to such an extent that one may feel the afterthought of this consideration. And so much effort is involved in tedious testing on dozens of devices.

3. Third-Party Integrations
   Another one was to integrate third-party services available in platform-specific SDKs. Sometimes, it had to write platform-specific code within the cross-platform framework, which added complexity to development.

Cross-Platform Mobile App Development Best Practices

As Alibaba's experience has shown, cross-platform development provides many solid benefits; however, with some best practices, developers and businesses can enjoy this most:

1. Right Framework
   When developing cross-platform mobile applications, a suitable framework must be chosen. The available choices include Flutter, React Native, and Xamarin. Alibaba opted for Flutter because it supports dynamic user interfaces and has a fast-growing developer community. Businesses should, therefore, focus on their requirements in terms of performance, flexibility, and community support when choosing a framework.

2. Performance Optimization
   Cross-platform applications generally have more performance issues than native applications. It would be in the developer's interest to optimize the application for reduced memory consumption, fewer images and media assets, and fewer third-party libraries. Alibaba would have spent huge amounts of time trying to optimize the application to meet native performance standards.

3. A Consistent Design Language Should Be Adopted
   The user experience will be smooth across the platforms only when there is consistency in design. Even though the design guidelines are of much importance to the different platforms, a cross-platform application should also include unified design elements. A balanced approach, like Alibaba did, ensures that the experience of the users on all devices is cohesive.

4. Test Across Devices and Platforms
   Since cross-platform applications run on hundreds of different devices and configurations, this means testing across these has to be reasonably rigorous to enable smooth functioning and performance, somewhat like Alibaba was able to with its scaled application to millions of users.

5. Leveraging Platform-Specific Features
   Cross-platform frameworks allow a single codebase, but where appropriate, one should still leverage platform-specific features. For example, Alibaba can use Android's push notification services while still having a cross-platform codebase.

How Appvintech Can Help

Partnering with a company that deals with enterprise mobile app development to specialize in the development of cross-platform mobile applications would be one step forward for those businesses interested in emulating Alibaba. Years of experience working on scalable, efficient cross-platform apps for rapidly growing enterprises like yours is why Appvintech is available to you: from e-commerce and logistics or any other space, best-of-breed cross-platform applications touching millions of users.
The cross-platform mobile application development might make Alibaba touch millions of people's lives and reduce its time-to-market cost with saved developments.

Frameworks like Flutter would let Alibaba standardize the process, provide consistency across all platforms, and scale.
Cross-platform development success story: a strong example of the value that can be emulated in business. This is very important to mention as it makes it look up to the history of the success of Alibaba.