> Is it that expensive to separate your business logic from UI and write the small UI layer in whatever the platform's "best practice" native language is?
I mean... yes? There is a ton of incidental complexity (i.e. unrelated to the business domain) involved in creating nice user experiences. If dev salaries weren’t so high then sure, more companies would probably spend the money to repeat the same work across several platforms, but right now? No way.
That said, I still think I agree that you give up more than you gain by going cross platform, at least for now, but I totally get how companies look at how much it’s costs to hire and says “you know what? I’ll take a cross-platform compromise”
Not to mention the LARGE realm of internal tools where you need something functional as conveniently as possible and aren't trying to drive a consumer-product-level market-differentiated experience.
It also takes time to ensure the feature is developed for all platforms. Due to low usage you may not bother developing for that platform. Thus feature in one platform lag other.
I worked for a company where we did iOS release after very 3 android release coz android was 80% users and iOS 20%. Mind you this was a cross platform Iconic/Cordova app. Now think if we did native. iOS users would have to wait even longer
Companies are too efficient for that, even if dev salaries were cheaper they would still want to fund just one version and pocket the difference, and eventually market competition will make that the norm.
Not only that, but corporations are not everything. What about one and two person shops? It would really be nice to be able to develop a product without first having to invent the universe.
Counterexample: banks started with shitty cross-platform UI type apps, but those received low customer satisfaction figures so most of them have now switched over to native apps. A similar thing happened with Facebook.
Users are not knowledgable enough to know what technology was used to build a product, but many have repeatedly complained about non-native UIs.
Heck, Lotus Notes went from being a market leader to an also-ran and user complaints about UX to corporate IT departments definitely played a role in convincing those departments in switching away.
More recently, this also happened with many mobile apps made with cross platform/HTML5 toolkits. They got low review scores and low user engagement across many firms, prompting a switch to native.
I mean... yes? There is a ton of incidental complexity (i.e. unrelated to the business domain) involved in creating nice user experiences. If dev salaries weren’t so high then sure, more companies would probably spend the money to repeat the same work across several platforms, but right now? No way.
That said, I still think I agree that you give up more than you gain by going cross platform, at least for now, but I totally get how companies look at how much it’s costs to hire and says “you know what? I’ll take a cross-platform compromise”