Native and cross-platform mobile: a practical guide

Teams tend to reach for this after something has already gone wrong. This guide covers what native and cross-platform mobile actually involves, where it usually goes wrong, and how to tell whether yours is in reasonable shape.

You do not control the device, the network, or the operating system version, and the design has to accept that. Nothing below assumes a large team or a large budget — most of it is a decision somebody has to make and then write down.

Why it matters

Cross-platform is a team decision as much as a technical one. Small and consistent beats large and occasional here. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.

For most businesses the question is not whether this matters but how much of it is worth doing right now. That depends on what you are trying to achieve in the next few months, not on best practice in the abstract. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge.

The practical version

Heavy device integration still favours native. There is a version of this that is over-engineered, and it is worth avoiding. If two people in the business would answer this differently, that gap is the actual problem.

Mobile releases are slower to correct than web ones, so the cost of shipping a mistake is higher. The version that works in practice is usually less elaborate than the version described in the guides.

Shipping one codebase badly is worse than two well. The cost of getting this wrong is rarely visible on the day it happens. The teams that stay on top of it are the ones who put it on a calendar rather than a wish list.

A working checklist

If you want a quick read on where you stand, work through this. Anything you cannot answer confidently is where to start.

• Cross-platform is a team decision as much as a technical one
• Heavy device integration still favours native
• Shipping one codebase badly is worse than two well
• Someone is named as the owner, not just assumed to be
• There is a date in the calendar to review it again
• The decision and the reasoning behind it are written down somewhere findable
• You could explain the current setup to a new hire in five minutes

Where it usually goes wrong

The most common failure is not doing this badly. It is doing it once, during a launch, and never revisiting it. Circumstances move, the setup does not, and the gap widens quietly until something breaks or somebody notices the numbers.

• It was configured during a launch and has not been touched since
• Different people in the business believe different things are true about it
• There is no way to tell whether the last change helped or hurt
• The only person who understands it has left, or is about to

The version of the app your customers are running is rarely the one you just shipped. That sounds obvious written down. It is still the thing most often skipped.

How we approach it

On our projects this gets handled during the build rather than added afterwards, because retrofitting it costs several times more than including it. We write down what was decided and why, so the next person to touch it is not guessing.

If you are working with someone else, the questions worth asking are simple: who owns this, how will we know it is working, and what happens when it needs to change?

Making it stick

Pick the single item from the checklist above that would cause the most trouble if it turned out to be wrong. Fix that one, confirm it worked, then move on. Most of the value here comes from doing the first two things, not all of them.