If you are using Flex for mobile (iOS/Android/Playbook), you get a common look/feel across all mobile devices. With high-level features like data binding, visual state management, a solid component/skinning model, transitioning model, etc, it is a generation or two ahead of iOS and Android (IMO). Plus, having seen native IOS, native Android and Flex development, the Flex platform is much better when it comes to the ease of development. Despite recent news that the Flash player is no longer being developed for mobile browsers, the native story remains strong.

We specifically agreed that a cross-platform solution was not the way we wanted to go.ĭepending on what you are building, Air is a great platform for developing cross-platform mobile applications. We wanted each app to give the best experience it could on its platform. We have native iOS and Android apps, on purpose, because we didn't want to give up platform-specific features. In my job, my boss and I had a specific conversation about this. When you choose to use a cross-platform tool you are actively choosing to give your user a less-than-ideal experience on their device, but YOU saved some time (maybe) getting your app to market. This is now my opinion: Native apps are better, simply because they present the user with a native experience - an experience that will feel familiar to them as a user of the platform. That is to say, you have available to you only the platform features available on ALL the platforms you are targeting.īuilding a native app - that is, using Xcode to build an iOS app and using the Android SDK to build an Android app - gives you complete access to all of a given platform's specific features and capabilities, thereby ensuring the best user experience on each platform. You are, in effect, choosing a lowest common denominator sort of solution. Generally speaking, if you use a cross-platform 'write it once and build for many platforms' tool you likely will give up the ability to take advantage of some (or all?) device- or platform-specific features.

Xcode vs android studio