It's been our experience with many cross-platform frameworks that there arenevertruly "write-once run everywhere" turn-key solutions for developers. There willalwaysbe frustrating hiccups where the translation between two different languages clashes.

That is why the costs of cross-platform development tools are hard to understand. If you want a pixel perfect user experience on every platform (with various degrees of fragmentation on each), then choosing an abstract solution for them all will quickly expose gaps in that abstracted framework and can cause usability and experiential problems for your users.

Here are a few of the biggest reasons to choose native development:

• Your developers haveTHE BESTchance of finding answers to tough problems
  • Google is your developers' most powerful tool. There are guaranteed to be more articles, answers, and support on the internet for Android (Java) and iOS (Objective-C) than for that cross-platform framework with a support forum.
• Debugging tools can be a pain
  • When your developers run into problems, both while developing and while pushing to production, debugging tools help them step through what's happening and examine everything. Native debugging tools are by far the most reliable when viewing production and development errors.
• Stable Support
  • You can rest assured that neither Google nor Apple are going anywhere anytime soon. Developing in natively supported languages allows you to sleep at night knowing that tomorrow, if there is a major bug in the code your developers are depending on today, it will get fixed quickly.
• Performance
  • By far the least performing cross-platform tools are generally mobile web-based apps wrapped in native browser apps. Second to them are the platforms that allow a language (like C#) to be interpreted to native code (like Java or Objective-C). In both of these scenarios, the mobile device is optimized to run native code. Injecting any language between that and native development will slow down your apps.
  • With native development, you are guaranteed the most optimized code you can hope for (unless your developers aren't writing optimized code, but this whitepaper assumes they're awesome!)