"That being said, if you’re making a game, it probably won’t work in cross-platform"<p>I feel like gaming is the easiest thing to do cross-platform since you don't rely on any native UI and OpenGL is pretty similar on different platforms. Unity, Unreal Engine, and many others are designed to target many platforms.
From the article: <i>"Sign up for my email newsletter and get a free framework decision email course. You'll learn effective ways to research framework pros and cons."</i> It's an ad.<p>Too many articles like this on HN lately - short, useless, lead to an ad. This looks like SEO crap, outsourced to Mechanical Turk or Upwork.
I recall seeing an interview with Paul Graham (IIRC), who said that developing web-based software allowed them to sell to Windows using customers without having to develop in Windows.<p>I think this partly explains the popularity of Javascript, Electron and Web apps among developers.
Beware: This article reads like it was written by somebody who has never developed a mobile app. Thus, before you go down this road, read below.<p>- Cross platform does not mean you can share the UI/design. Different mobile platforms require different accordances that users are accomstomed to. So your design and code might have to be different, just as it would be for native.<p>- Just because you are using a cross platform framework does not mean you sidestep the nuances of the framework itself or that of the host platform. In fact, it just makes things worse because you have to code around these nuances. Due to the underlying way iOS/Android work (e.g. permissions or the differences between Android’s activities or UIViewController on iOS), you will still need a fair amount of platform specific code.<p>- Many cross platform frameworks have limited support for other libraries and if not you need to go native to support them. At this point you may as well be developing natively.<p>- The performance can matter quite a bit. However, unlike native your ability to do anything to resolve these issues is extremely limited. Maybe it doesn’t matter a ton depending on the use case, but people do notice. Only being able to solve it by dropping into native sort of defeats the purpose of cross platform.<p>When you add all these up, the benefits of cross platform get very muddled.<p>It is far better to prove out your app on one platform, get users, solve problems, and when you have more resources and a good process, go to other platforms. If you don’t succeed on one platform, not being cross-platform would be an unlikely reason.<p>In the case of React Native, it is possible to have a hybrid, which may let you get around some trade offs.
>I would go so far as to say if you are building anything other than a game, performance is not really going to be an issue you’ll run into.<p>My experience is the opposite. Every application that's more complex than a guitar tuner starts to lag after it's been open for too long or when I'm viewing too many resources at once: Web browsers, website-specific browsers (e.g. reddit clients), mail clients, IM apps like telegram, etc.<p>Responsiveness is one of the most important aspects in a mobile app. It makes the difference between getting the job done and wanting to smash my phone with a hammer.
Answer lies in the question I believe, non-business users don’t necessarily know the details and like to pick something that’s cross-platform to meet their business objectives. Practically having two different teams in sync needs extreme collaboration between them, often I have seen other extreme when logic and calculations are computed differently by different teams and users of each platforms were given different experiences. For most business apps, cross platform serves well enough. Easy to extend an web developer to build these apps than having to learn different platforms. Web platforms serves well over time. There exists a certain set of problem spaces when native apps are better. Let the needs drive the decision to choose the platform - would be the wiser option. End of the day business pays for these apps. (I am a full stack Dev.)
People love cross-platform because the half-life of app programming knowledge is something like 4 months.<p>If you take your toes out of app programming for even a year, you're almost completely lost when you come back.<p>Cross platform means that you don't have to climb two learning curves simultaneously.
> That being said, if you’re making a game, it probably won’t work in cross-platform.<p>What? Ever heard of Unity, powering the majority of games out there?
They've been sold on shortened time to market.<p>The author's "business people" is transparently a euphemism for "clueless technologist" but what they actually care about is finance. Specifically, the time value of money and why they don't want to hire another two people to do Android and iOS in addition to the Web.<p>The marketing message from the cross-platform framework folks was aimed well and hit the mark. "Spend your time and money with us (or our consultants), not your expensive and peculiar developers. Together we'll achieve 3x the results for 1x the cost!"