Five mistakes teams make with native and cross-platform mobile

We end up explaining this on discovery calls often enough that it deserved writing down. These are the ones we run into repeatedly when we audit native and cross-platform mobile.

Mobile releases are slower to correct than web ones, so the cost of shipping a mistake is higher. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.

Common failure modes

• Treating it as a launch task rather than an ongoing one
• Assuming someone else already owns it
• Cross-platform is a team decision as much as a technical one
• Heavy device integration still favours native
• Never checking whether the fix actually worked

Shipping one codebase badly is worse than two well. The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets. The failure mode is not doing it wrong, it is doing it once and assuming it stays done.

A reasonable first step

In practice

The version of the app your customers are running is rarely the one you just shipped. 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

None of this needs a rewrite. Most of it is a morning's work once someone decides to do it.