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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."
If you're gonna do cross platform app development, at least make the effort to follow the platform's UI guidelines. As an Android user, nothing irks me more than having an app with the iOS icons and navigation buttons simply copied over. I'm sure the same is true for users of other platforms.
The one thing that irks me a bit about this whole situation is them complaining that they just can't write the code once and have it work across the different platforms, yet I'm still required to buy the same software separately on each platform. In my mind, you justify the cost to make it work for that platform by selling it on the specific platform. My opinion would probably be different though if I was able to buy the app once and not have to pay on each separate platform.
I built a rather extensive commercial App on iOS. By abstracting the data/business layers well, when going to android it was as simple as writing a lexer to convert almost all the code. What took me 1000 hours of development took 8 hours to port over.
The only thing that was really required was writing the UI, which was targeted for Android.
Webapps are like cross platform apps, but on top of that they're crammed into a medium that was never meant for them, so instead of being just non-ideal they truly suck.
The only people who like web apps are the ones who don't have to use them (managers) and people who liked the idea of being able to get their e-mail anywhere, before everyone started carrying smartphones with... a native e-mail app.