Build for one mobile platform first

Photo by nrkbeta

In the inquiries that we receive from enterprise and startup clients, they frequently ask us to develop their apps for iOS and Android using either some multi platform technology or simply build them both iOS and Android apps for the price of one !!!

There are indeed some technologies that provide an impressive degree of cross-platform development abilities. In fact they do work well for building prototypes and minimum viable products, but they are no match for the polished and seamless user experience that native apps provide.

Also development of an app requires going through many development cycles, testing ideas, and making refinements until the overall software design and usability reaches a desirable level.

We suggest that you start building for one mobile platform first. This way you get to do all your experiments and refinements on a single platform and learn what approach works best for you. Then you can take part of this experience and use it to build for the other platform. Of course every platform has its own unique challenges that need to be faced. For example if you are building for the Android devices, due to it’s market fragmentation, you are going to have to test your app on more devices. However as a general rule if you try to build for both platforms at once, the cost of experimentation adds up very quickly you will end up burning a lot more resources than you need to.