The Headaches of Cross-Platform Mobile Development

snydeq writes "Increased emphasis on distinctive smartphone UIs means even more headaches for cross-platform mobile developers, writes Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister, especially as users continue to favor native over Web-based apps on mobile devices. 'Google and Microsoft are both placing renewed emphasis on their platforms' user experience. That means not just increased competition among smartphone and tablet platforms, but also new challenges for mobile application developers. ... The more the leading smartphone platform UIs differ from one another, the more effort is required to write apps that function comparably across all of them. Dialog boxes, screen transitions, and gestures that are appropriate for one platform might be all wrong for another. Coding the same app for three or four different sets of user interface guidelines adds yet another layer of cost and complexity to cross-platform app development."

Comments

Advice

[ackthpt]

Keep it simple, Stupid

I'm developing an app which can be run cross-platform and/or mobile. Turned out to be a giant nightmare when looking at user experience on a tablet or smartphone. So .. I bailed on anything whizzy and went back to finding the basic html and javascript to get things done -- look and work consistently on multiple platforms and also be visible in sunlight (something a lot of apps fail miserably at.)

Re:Advice

[thegarbz]

So you're coding in the most inefficient way for each device to run your app then?

I feel for you. Your problem has been experienced by many who don't wish to rewrite that Objective-C app in Java, don't want to maintain two packages on different platforms without common bugs, and don't want to re-design your app so that on iOS it has a back button in the top left while on Android it obeys the hardware back key.

However before you continue I suggest you look at the ratings of apps on each market that are written in the way you're suggesting. Inconsistent with the native UI of the platform makes the app look .... cheap. An app that runs in HTML / JS is inherently incredibly slow compared to a native app which further upsets the user experience.

If you want to write a 5star app you'll likely need to abandon any hope of cross platform compatibility and simply code from the ground up for each platform.

Re:lol, cry more, noob

[TheCouchPotatoFamine]

well.. not strictly true. IIRC iOS and android are both converging on (or already have) a view-based hierarchy... the way god intended. Personally i hate the signal-and-slots or win32 methods versus the DOM/events methodology - even if HTML's take on it is a little sprained... however, when i look at iOS, i see the DOM/event pattern, just without the xml (for the programmer, anyway, it's right there in the NIB..)