What to ask your agency about native and cross-platform mobile
It is rarely the thing that gets a project approved, and often the thing that decides how it goes. If you are briefing an agency or a freelancer on native and cross-platform mobile, these questions are worth asking early.
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.
Questions worth asking
- Who will actually do this work, and have they done it before?
- How will we know afterwards whether it worked?
- What happens if it needs changing in a year?
- What are you assuming that we have not confirmed?
What a good answer sounds like
Cross-platform is a team decision as much as a technical one. This is the sort of thing that compounds, quietly, in both directions. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.
Shipping one codebase badly is worse than two well. Getting it slightly wrong is survivable. Ignoring it entirely is not. The teams that stay on top of it are the ones who put it on a calendar rather than a wish list.
What this looks like day to day
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
Worth checking on your own setup before it becomes someone else's problem to fix.