Three myths about native and cross-platform mobile

It comes up on almost every project, usually later than it should. A few things about native and cross-platform mobile that get repeated more often than they get checked.

The version of the app your customers are running is rarely the one you just shipped. It rarely shows up as a line item, which is exactly why it slips.

“It only matters for big sites”

Cross-platform is a team decision as much as a technical one. That sounds obvious written down. It is still the thing most often skipped. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.

“We can deal with it after launch”

Sometimes true, usually expensive. There is a version of this that is over-engineered, and it is worth avoiding.

“Our platform handles it”

Shipping one codebase badly is worse than two well. This is the sort of thing that compounds, quietly, in both directions. The failure mode is not doing it wrong, it is doing it once and assuming it stays done.

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
• Cross-platform is a team decision as much as a technical one — 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.