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by kmdev
4217 days ago
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Tradeoffs (and I'm sure I'm mostly preaching to the choir). Generally, for non-trivial mobile apps, you want to try and build native versions for Android/iOS first. Frameworks that are cross-platform just aren't up to par in many aspects (again, for non trivial apps). While you may be able to get performance close enough to native performance with a cross-platform framework, you're still going to be spending a significant amount of time on the UI/UX side customizing to ensure your app's look, feel and general flow line up with the standards and best practices for that platform. This is not a trivial concern. Facebook found that out the hard way on Android as one example. Users learn and form muscle memory on the platform they choose to invest in and respond very poorly if your app doesn't deliver a UI/UX that adheres nicely to the platform standards. Another concern, which is being addressed, but is going to be an ongoing concern for still some time, is API feature access on each platform. Cross-platform frameworks are continually playing catch-up to try implement access to the most important new API additions on each platform. The gap has certainly been shortened, especially in the location services area but ultimately, there won't be API access parity across platforms for quite some time and it will still lag behind the native implementations. Again, this is all in general, applies the most to bigger apps and/or apps that rely heavily on fast performance or access to specific native APIs and based on one mobile devs experience. It is exciting to see that for most things that are somewhere between a blog and a small to non-trivial application, just focusing on making sure your site/small app works well on most mobile browsers is sufficient. You can also usually wrap things up in each platforms' version of a WebView if you want to get your app/site listed on each store for that extra exposure. Again though, you have to be very careful doing that for the same UI/UX concerns mentioned earlier. Getting away from the more technical aspects, just looking at WP market share vs Android/iOS means that even if a business wants to hit every platform, they're still going to start with iOS/Android and making sure they have a good mobile site experience before looking at WP. Add in the cost of finding a dev to work on your WP build (or assigning one from another team to it) and you end up with only the largest entities having the man-power and expertise to be able to justify a priority list that includes executing nice implementations across all platforms, including WP. |
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