Episode description

Guest

• Rob Kerr - @rekerrsive

Why should companies go with a cross-platform solution?

• Consistent User Experience (whether that's a good idea or not)
• Synchronicity in Code Base
• Budget - Use existing team expertise 

What are the differences between cross-platform solutions?

• Web Based - Cordova, Ionic, PhoneGap
• Bridging Solution - Flutter, React Native, NativeScript
• Language Based - Xamarin - Use C# to Call Native API

What are the challenges with cross-platform solution?

• Dependent on Vendor Support
  • Dev teams need to keep Cross-Platform Tooling up to date
• Using a Specific API (Metal, HealthKit, etc…) 
  • May not be supported by Cross-Platform Tool
• There may be instances such as UI - you want differences between devices

Social Media

Twitter - @brightdigit
Facebook - BrightDigit
LinkedIn - BrightDigit
Instagram - @brightdigit

Transcript

[00:00:00] Leo Dion (Host): Today with us. We have Rob Kerr. You want to go ahead and introduce yourself. 

[00:00:05] Rob Kerr (Guest): My name is Rob Kerr. I'm a consultant working primarily in mobile platforms a lot of native development but more and more it's cross-platform with Xamarin, Flutter, and some other tools and I work with primarily business customers who are looking to deliver applications to both IOS and Android with the most efficient development process that they can experience.

[00:00:29] Leo Dion (Host): Awesome, really glad to have you on Rob. I've known you for three or four years now. It seems like. 

[00:00:35] Rob Kerr (Guest): Something like that. 

[00:00:37] Leo Dion (Host): Yeah, and we've met either at meetups or touch base every so often. So it sounds like recently you've been doing a lot of cross-platform development. And like I said, I have a little bit of experience with that of dabbled a little bit in Cordova as well.

[00:00:54] My bread-and-butter, my expertise is obviously Swift [that is] native Swift development. That's what I like to do. I think it has a lot of advantages but there could be situations like business reasons valid business reasons to go cross-platform, right? 

[00:01:10] Rob Kerr (Guest): Yeah, I think so. And I think you and I have similar backgrounds in solutions as far as Apple. I've done a ton of native development in Swift and iOS and some on Android as well. Probably the last year or two a lot of my work has been cross platform and it's kind of driven by that business need or want to you know, hit both platforms efficiently. And currently in the IOS app store has you know about 1.8 million apps and the Play Store has about 2.1 million but the stats tell us that I think AppFigures had a study that only 450 thousand apps are truly cross platform where the same application is deployed in both platforms, which is you know, it's really small numbers less than 10 percent.

[00:01:54] And so when will you find is you know, Everyone would kind of like to be on both platforms at the same time, but not a lot of folks are or at least not not an efficient way. So in the past you mentioned Cordova and PhoneGap and probably five or six years ago that was almost the only game in town.

[00:02:11] But now this cross-platform frameworks are you know sprouting up quite a bit and all of the mega vendors offer something like Flutter or React Native or Xamarin from Microsoft. And so it's definitely coming into its own and there's certainly those those applications like business applications, especially where you need to have both platforms, but maybe don't want to fund building the app twice once for each so yeah, I think so.

[00:02:38] Leo Dion (Host): What are some situations where businesses should choose cross platform as opposed to a native? 

[00:02:46] Rob Kerr (Guest): Yeah, that's a good question. And that's you know comes up a lot because the sort of the reasons not to usually drive into accessing very exotic APIs and things like that. In my mind if a business really wants to deliver on both platforms, especially if they like to do it at the same time that kind of tends toward cross-platform if you can particularly if the user experience they wanted to be the same on both platforms then using something cross-platform maybe doesn't mandate it but certainly makes it much likely that an application is going to work the same way so that when the support call comes in then you know somebody who needs to help a user doesn't have to think about you know, how does this work on Android how does this work on iOS. How's the potentially work on Windows? 

[00:03:29] Then the obvious, you know elephant in the room is just budget. If you have to build the same application twice that costs, you know potentially twice as much typically usually other different teams that work on IOS and Android if they're done completely native.

[00:03:44] And then you know, you really have to think about in the long term how does that go into support cost? So if the application has to have a life cycle, new features that we added bugs need to be fixed, if they're written in two different languages than two platforms than that's something to think about so. As I think about it and on the consumer market, if you are going to develop an application to compete with one of Apple's native apps or Android and it needs to be really exotic, you know, cross-platform might not be the right choice for that.

[00:04:16] But for the vast majority of apps are content consumpution or business orientated and so on It's probably the majority of the leading cross-platform tools can deliver an app with the same user experience. So something to think about.

[00:04:33] Leo Dion (Host): It's funny you mention user experience. I would say that can be a benefit of cross-platform but also a hindrance in a lot of ways because like recently I was doing work with the client and they were really good about making sure that the user experience was actually different on both platforms precisely because of the expectations that certain like Android users have with their UI and Apple users have with their UI - there are definitely big differences. Specificly I'm just like thinking about like hamburger menus is like we don't have hamburger menus is very much on iOS and that's that's one of the jarring things is when you use a cross-platform app.

[00:05:18] It can be obvious and jarring when you're using an app that is built cross platform, but doesn't like take into account like the user experience differences between both platforms. 

[00:05:33] Rob Kerr (Guest): Yeah, there's a little bit to unpack there because as I've worked with clients that you know, definitely wanted pixel-perfect identical experiences in both platforms.

[00:05:42] Now, you might argue that you shouldn't do that right and Google and Apple and tell you shouldn't do that because you're not following their conventions and that's a very va...