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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-22T17:10:47+00:00

I’m about to work on developing an application on tablets (Android/iPad). Our clients ask

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I’m about to work on developing an application on tablets (Android/iPad).
Our clients ask us to make it cross platform unless there is any reason to stick to one.
I’ve looked at some posts related to cross-platform iOS/Android development here, but I’m still not sure if I should just develop a native application on a specific platform or I should try to make it cross-platform.
I’m new to developing applications on mobile devices.
If you can provide any advice/experience, that would be great!

As far as I know, for technical reasons, the trade-offs are as follows:

  • Native applications are faster, but it’s not easy to reuse the codes on other platforms.
  • Cross-platform solutions using web-based applications (e.g. PhoneGap) have slower performance, limited access to OS and hardware APIs, web-like user interface.
  • Cross-platform solutions like Appcelerator Titanium compile the codes to native codes but I’m not sure about its limitation (if I have to change it back to native application after developing for three months, I’ll cry!) and it costs money.

Also, for time/effort needed to develop a native application or cross-platform application on tablets, in general, is it easier and more reliable to develop/maintain a native application than a cross-platform solution?

Any suggestions?

Thanks in advance! 🙂

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Personally I would stick with native apps. I’m working for a company that wants to create apps for multiple platforms as well and they have been looking for alternatives to native development, such as Titanium and PhoneGap. We’ve chosen for the following approach:

    • I’ve been hired to develop the iPhone app.
    • Some students for a University will probably work on the Android version, where the data framework / layer will look and work somewhat the same as my Objective-C code, e.g.:

    -getFlightInfoWithId:forUserId: will become something like (void)getFlightInfo(flightId, userId) in Java.

    The view and controller layers will probably differ in huge ways, mostly because Android and iOS devices have different GUI guidelines and capabilities (e.g. Android screen sizes can differ a lot, whereas on iOS there are only 2 real options).

    For other smaller platforms we’ll be offering a HTML5 app. To me native apps are always preferable to apps created with cross-platform toolsets as generally native apps should perform better, should have a better ‘feeling’ and might have some more capabilities, e.g. might be able to use some hardware features that are native to the platform and unavailable in a cross-platform toolset.

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