Developing applications targeting mobile devices is a complex task involving numerous options, technologies and trade-offs, much so due to the proliferation and fragmentation of devices and platforms. With the rising demands of smart phones and tablets, mobile apps are becoming ubiquitous, hence developing applications for mobiles are getting quite challenging in terms of cost, effort and marketing. There are varieties of operating systems in the market that are unalike, which are an obstacle to developers when it comes to developing a single application for different operating system. The results of this work indicate that even though cross platform tools are not fully matured they show great potential and reduce the cost associated in developing native mobile applications. Hybrid mobile development is equally suitable for rapid development of high-fidelity prototypes of the mobile application as well as fairly complex, resource intensive mobile applications on its own right. As the upcoming future trends and the evolution of HTML5 continues to redefine the web, allowing its growth as a software platform, there remains great opportunities for cross-platform mobile development and hence provides an attractive alternative for the native mobile development.