Native or Cross-Platform?

What the choice actually costs

Two native apps means two codebases, two sets of skills and two of every future change. Cross-platform means one codebase producing both, with platform-specific code where it matters.

For a typical business app the saving is 30–40% of the build and a similar proportion of ongoing maintenance. That is significant enough that cross-platform should be the default and native the justified exception.

When cross-platform is clearly right

• The app is mostly forms, lists, detail screens and API calls — which describes most business apps
• You want both platforms and have one budget
• The team maintaining it afterwards is small
• Feature parity across platforms matters to you
• Time to market is a real constraint

Field service, ordering, booking, internal tools, customer portals, loyalty. All of these are well served by a cross-platform build and users cannot tell.

When native still wins

• Sustained high-performance graphics — games, heavy real-time rendering
• Deep device integration: advanced camera control, sensors, background location at high frequency
• You need a new OS feature the day it launches
• Heavy on-device machine learning
• Platform-specific interface conventions are central to the product

The honest test: does your app do something unusual with the hardware? If not, the cross-platform argument is difficult to beat with a straight face.

The comparison in practice

What we use and why

We build most business apps with Flutter or React Native. Flutter gives consistent rendering across platforms and excellent performance for interface-heavy apps; React Native suits teams who already have React skills and want to share knowledge with a web codebase.

Both are mature, both are used by large companies in production, and either is a defensible choice. The deciding factor is usually what your team already knows, because that is who maintains it after we finish.

The hybrid nobody mentions

You can mix. A cross-platform app can drop into native code for one demanding feature — a custom camera flow, a specific sensor integration — while everything else stays shared.

This is how most of the difficult cases actually get solved, and it means the native-versus-cross-platform decision is rarely as absolute as it is presented. Build shared, go native where the evidence forces it.

Frequently asked questions