Native Apps vs Write-Once, Run Everywhere

I’m not as tech­ni­cal as I wish. So you need to read this by Drop­box: The (not so) hid­den cost of shar­ing code between iOS and Android.

For me it’s obvi­ous. When an app does­n’t respect the acces­si­bil­i­ty set­tings I have on the phone, I get angry. (Of course, ‘angry’ is my go-to, so take that for what it’s worth.)

I have this blood pres­sure hard­ware device that’s great, but the soft­ware… it sucks. I can’t read it with­out my glass­es even though I’ve set my iPhone to have text quite large.

I think it’s real­ly impor­tant to fit into the cus­tomer’s world, and not remind the cus­tomer that they’re step­ping out of their world to use your prod­uct. But, I’m not tech­ni­cal enough to express the devel­op­ment process behind that.

And that’s why I like this Drop­box post. Many large com­pa­nies have moved from “write once, run any­where” to native devel­op­ment teams, but this post is the first that address­es the prac­ti­cal day-to-day rea­sons.

I think we’re in such a dif­fer­ent world from “win­dows and a brows­er” and most com­pa­nies haven’t fig­ured it out yet. We real­ly are ear­ly in the mobile com­put­ing world when it comes to the expe­ri­ence we can expect as cus­tomers.