A practical checklist for native and cross-platform mobile
Every audit we run turns up some version of this. Run through this the next time native and cross-platform mobile comes up.
The version of the app your customers are running is rarely the one you just shipped. The teams that stay on top of it are the ones who put it on a calendar rather than a wish list.
The checklist
- 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
- There is a date to review it again
What it costs to ignore
Cross-platform is a team decision as much as a technical one. None of that requires a large budget, only a decision and someone to own it. Doing this properly once is usually cheaper than doing it approximately three times.
In practice
You do not control the device, the network, or the operating system version, and the design has to accept that. Three things worth confirming about native and cross-platform mobile before you move on:
- Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
- Heavy device integration still favours native — and you know whether that is true here
- There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped
If you are not sure where your systems currently stand on this, it takes us about an hour to find out.