Building your app cross-platform can be dangerous, especially for startups

Photo by Casey Horner on Unsplash

The endless debate. Cross-platform or native?

I have sat in many a meeting discussing this question. Do we go cross-platform? Or do we got native?

I’ve had to reap the consequences of both concluding decisions. I’ve worked on 15+ native iOS applications. I’ve worked on 2 cross-platform applications. (specifically Ionic). My conclusion…

Be very careful before you rush into building your app cross-platform for 2 reasons.

1. You may encounter an issue that is more difficult to handle cross-platform native.
2. Cross-platform tools are an additional layer to native. So you may run into issues where the implementation of a feature is vastly inferior. Or sometimes non-existent.

From andplus.com:

Hardware features: Similar to UI rendering, access to hardware features is realized differently on each platform. On top of that, the same type of feature — the near-field communication (NFC) radio, say — may work differently on each platform, or may be accessible on one platform but not the other. It was only recently that Apple allowed third-party app access to the iPhone’s NFC radio, and then only in a limited way; Android has allowed unfettered access to device NFC radios for a long…