My personal beliefs on cross-platform development were formed in November 1993. I worked at The Coca-Cola Company at the time, and a few colleagues and I were discussing how to provide Mac users with the same set of applications that we were building on Windows 3.1 with PowerBuilder.
The discussion centered around the UI. The concern was with providing a Windows-centric interface to Mac users. I remember one of the great lines from the meeting: "If you provide Windows help to a user expecting Mac balloon help, you are going to have users that hate you." After this and some personal experiments, I came to agree with this viewpoint. If developers want to make users as happy as possible, they need to call the native APIs of the platform.
Fast-forward to 2009, when I fell in love with the Xamarin iOS product from the first announcement. Xamarin had created a way for C# developers to use the Microsoft .NET Framework and to call into the native platform APIs. Xamarin Android operated the same way. While I would often discuss the need for a cross-platform UI with Xamarin management, I never forgot the lessons of cross-platform from many years ago. At the same time, I knew that there was a need for a cross-platform toolset to create an application. I had talked to enough people to understand the pain and agony. Quite honestly, I was a fence sitter in this area. I liked the idea of XF, but I was never quite ready to make the jump and, honestly, try XF for anything more than some personal experiments and helping a couple of customers.
The problem with cross-platform tools is that they tend to target the lowest common denominator. This commoditizes the UI. This isn't necessarily a bad thing. Time to market can be improved. There are lots of applications that don't need a fully optimized platform. There are a number of applications where getting something out quickly and solving a business problem can be the most important factor.
There's no "one size fits all" solution no matter what some faction wants to preach. Some applications have very device-specific needs -- some applications don't -- it very much depends on the situation. Users, the ones who pay for development, tend to want applications that look, smell and taste like every other application that they already have. The worst possible situation to get yourself into is the one where you start down the road of using a cross-platform framework, and the users demand so many features that are platform-specific that it would've been easier and cheaper to have just built two or more platform-specific applications. That is a special type of hell. I've been there, and it's a bad conversation to have with a paying customer. The bottom line is that you need to have a real-world discussion with your users and the people that sign the checks. No one will quite understand it, but morally, you really need to have this conversation in the consulting world.
