Native and cross-platform mobile for small teams

Every audit we run turns up some version of this. Most advice about native and cross-platform mobile assumes a team that does not exist at your size. Here is the version that does not.

The version of the app your customers are running is rarely the one you just shipped. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.

What to keep

Cross-platform is a team decision as much as a technical one. Getting it slightly wrong is survivable. Ignoring it entirely is not. It rarely shows up as a line item, which is exactly why it slips.

What to drop

Process that exists to coordinate ten people is overhead when there are two of you. Getting it slightly wrong is survivable. Ignoring it entirely is not.

How we handle it

Shipping one codebase badly is worse than two well. Small and consistent beats large and occasional here. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.

What this looks like day to day

Mobile releases are slower to correct than web ones, so the cost of shipping a mistake is higher. 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

Most of the value here comes from doing the first two things, not all of them.