Five years ago, choosing cross-platform meant accepting visible compromises in performance and feel. That's no longer true for the vast majority of consumer and business apps — frameworks like React Native now deliver experiences that are functionally indistinguishable from native for most use cases.
The questions that actually determine our recommendation: does the app need deep integration with platform-specific hardware or APIs? Is there an existing web team whose skills should transfer? And how important is shipping to both platforms simultaneously versus iterating quickly on one?
For the majority of products — especially those with a web counterpart, or where speed to market and shared codebases matter — cross-platform is the pragmatic choice. It lets a single team ship and maintain both platforms, which compounds in your favor over the life of the product.
Native still earns its place for apps that lean heavily on platform-specific capabilities: complex AR experiences, deep system integrations, or performance-critical workloads like real-time audio processing. We scope these case by case rather than defaulting to either approach.
