[SkyPuncher]

> I just don't understand why they put so much effort into trying to fit a square peg into a round hole instead of just going with native development.

I think in the case of something like Facebook, the sheer complexity of their product drives a need for a singular code base. It would slow their engineering organization to a halt to ensure feature parity with largely seperate code bases.

[menckenjr]

This is only true if you're working with multiple completely separate teams each working in a silo to develop their own product and then post hoc some manager decides they have to have the same feature set. If they do it the right way around, specifying the common feature set comes first and then the dev teams do the app architecture on their separate platforms. As the features are developed and change requests inevitably arrive, the same sequence applies and you have an orderly process and the same app on two or more platforms without having to graft a third party dependency octopus onto your codebase.