Episode Details

Guest

• Rob Kerr - @rekerrsive

Why should companies go with a cross-platform solution?

• Consistent User Experience (whether that's a good idea or not)
• Synchronicity in Code Base
• Budget - Use existing team expertise 

What are the differences between cross-platform solutions?

• Web Based - Cordova, Ionic, PhoneGap
• Bridging Solution - Flutter, React Native, NativeScript
• Language Based - Xamarin - Use C# to Call Native API

What are the challenges with cross-platform solution?

• Dependent on Vendor Support
  • Dev teams need to keep Cross-Platform Tooling up to date
• Using a Specific API (Metal, HealthKit, etc…) 
  • May not be supported by Cross-Platform Tool
• There may be instances such as UI - you want differences between devices

Social Media

Twitter - @brightdigit
Facebook - BrightDigit
LinkedIn - BrightDigit
Instagram - @brightdigit

Transcript

[00:00:00] Leo Dion (Host): Today with us. We have Rob Kerr. You want to go ahead and introduce yourself. 

[00:00:05] Rob Kerr (Guest): My name is Rob Kerr. I'm a consultant working primarily in mobile platforms a lot of native development but more and more it's cross-platform with Xamarin, Flutter, and some other tools and I work with primarily business customers who are looking to deliver applications to both IOS and Android with the most efficient development process that they can experience.

[00:00:29] Leo Dion (Host): Awesome, really glad to have you on Rob. I've known you for three or four years now. It seems like. 

[00:00:35] Rob Kerr (Guest): Something like that. 

[00:00:37] Leo Dion (Host): Yeah, and we've met either at meetups or touch base every so often. So it sounds like recently you've been doing a lot of cross-platform development. And like I said, I have a little bit of experience with that of dabbled a little bit in Cordova as well.

[00:00:54] My bread-and-butter, my expertise is obviously Swift [that is] native Swift development. That's what I like to do. I think it has a lot of advantages but there could be situations like business reasons valid business reasons to go cross-platform, right? 

[00:01:10] Rob Kerr (Guest): Yeah, I think so. And I think you and I have similar backgrounds in solutions as far as Apple. I've done a ton of native development in Swift and iOS and some on Android as well. Probably the last year or two a lot of my work has been cross platform and it's kind of driven by that business need or want to you know, hit both platforms efficiently. And currently in the IOS app store has you know about 1.8 million apps and the Play Store has about 2.1 million but the stats tell us that I think AppFigures had a study that only 450 thousand apps are truly cross platform where the same application is deployed in both platforms, which is you know, it's really small numbers less than 10 percent.

[00:01:54] And so when will you find is you know, Everyone would kind of like to be on both platforms at the same time, but not a lot of folks are or at least not not an efficient way. So in the past you mentioned Cordova and PhoneGap and probably five or six years ago that was almost the only game in town.

[00:02:11] But now this cross-platform frameworks are you know sprouting up qui