Choosing the right platform for your startup’s app

For a lot of today’s startups, most interactions with customers happen through an app, taking the place of a traditional physical presence and customer service.

When I think of Uber, I don’t think of a building somewhere in San Francisco. I think little cars on a map jiggling towards my destination, and avatars of drivers prompting me to rate them after I’ve been dropped off.

To me as a user, “Uber” is the app on my phone.

And for all the startups we deal with at Custom D, apps are at the heart of their offering.

A crucial decision for early stage startups.

Balancing the need to deliver a great experience with time and cost to build an app can be tricky. It’s high pressure when funding is limited and the shortest distance to paying customers is what’s needed.

To make things more complicated, there seems to be a new app-building platform released every week.

Some promise speed-to-market but may bottleneck or introduce issues when you gain traction. Others give you flexibility and power, but require more development effort.

Non-technical founders struggle to tell the difference and end up with whatever their developers choose or are biased towards. So understanding some basics will help keep you informed.

Important factors.

Speed to market: Picking one platform over another may double or triple the implementation time.

User Experience: Some features (e.g. mobile phone functions) are better taken advantage of by certain platforms. This might be make-or-break depending on your product.

Performance: Platform choice can have an impact on whether parts of the app feel sluggish or smooth and speedy.

Development Cost: Time is money. Going native for example requires more development effort for both platforms (iOS and Android).

What are the different platforms for Startup Apps?

Native

This is considered gold standard, often with a price tag to match. It means building the app in the language that is native to the device: iOS and/or Android. This gives developers the most power to leverage the full device and operating system capabilities but it also means developing in two languages: essentially two projects. If done properly, it can give you the best performance and slickest experience. It will require significant investment and ongoing maintenance for each platform.

Cross Platform

Cross-platform encompasses frameworks and languages which allow developers to share their codebase across multiple platforms, keeping time and cost down, while still using native rendering engines on those devices to deliver close-to-native user experience and performance.

Unless there's a compelling reason to go native and a budget to match, cross-platform is what we generally recommend.

Hybrid

Hybrid apps are built using web technologies, then put in native wrappers for iOS and Android. This approach was traditionally the lowest-cost way of developing an app, but can suffer from performance issues and undermine the user experience.

Hybrid frameworks are still a good option but need to be weighed up carefully and their limitations should be well understood first.

So which platform is best for Startup's?

There is no single best, as it depends on your priorities in the context of the different factors mentioned above.

At Custom D we build using cross-platforms such as React. Most of the startups that come to us are in the early stage and we find cross-platform to offer the best balance and flexibility. It also makes app updates a lot easier than a native app, something important when you’re releasing upgrades and enhancements.

If a client’s requirements demand it, we will refer to a partner who builds native iOS/Android apps. And that’s definitely sometimes the best approach.

Feel free to talk to us about your idea for some free and unbiased (or only slightly biased) advice about which is best.