| If there was a common native language between Android/iOS, it would make things easier for sure. But using a third language to solve the existing problem is a rookie error. > 90+% of your mobile code can be shared between Android and iOS This stat depends on how complex your app is, but it usually only applies to gaming. Otherwise it's almost always false. We've already been down this path with the webview craze a few years ago. It was a total nightmare. These newer cross platform frameworks may no longer use webviews, but under the hood things are just as gross. What is true though is that these cross platform frameworks always oversell themselves (with the exception of Unity3D). You end up trading in one problem for another. Among the many problems you will encounter: 1. You miss a lot of newer features in the native platforms. If you want to incorporate those features somehow, the code becomes a conditional mess. 2. Performance is very meh and your hands are mostly tied in optimization. In both Android and iOS, getting performance correct (for example in a table view) requires a lot of tweaking. All of the cross platform frameworks I've used, including React Native, work for basic cases but quickly start dropping frames after that. 3. The majority of a mobile app's code is front-end, and this is not the place where you want to share code. Users on each platform expect different types of interactions and behaviors, not to mention UI aesthetics. 4. These different platforms all have their own characteristics and ways of doing things. These differences are not easily abstracted out. At the point where you are coding around these differences, you might as well have two different code bases. For all the complaining about differences between WebKit/Chrome/IE etc, the behavior is remarkably similar -- mobile platforms are far more diverged. 5. Native third-party libraries are very difficult to use because there is never the same library on the other platform. If there is, say with Facebook, they are not in sync. 6. You end up writing a lot of bridge code between iOS/Android and the framework. It's never pretty and painful to debug. 7. Getting locked into a third-party's framework is a bad place to be later on. Once it's in there, it's never coming out. I could go on... If you absolutely need to go cross platform early on, the best thing you can do for yourself is to lock down a common API/data model as early as possible, and create an aesthetic and design that is simple to implement on both platforms. |