A short guide to native and cross-platform mobile

The advice here is unglamorous, which is probably why it gets skipped. Everything we would tell a client about native and cross-platform mobile in the time it takes to drink a coffee.

You do not control the device, the network, or the operating system version, and the design has to accept that. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.

Why it matters

Cross-platform is a team decision as much as a technical one. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly. It is worth deciding this deliberately rather than inheriting whatever the last person set up.

What good looks like

Heavy device integration still favours native. That sounds obvious written down. It is still the thing most often skipped. The version that survives contact with a real deadline is the simple one.

What to watch for

Shipping one codebase badly is worse than two well. This is the sort of thing that compounds, quietly, in both directions. It rarely shows up as a line item, which is exactly why it slips.

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
• 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

Worth checking on your own setup before it becomes someone else's problem to fix.