I've been developing native mobile applications for about 8 years now. There's nothing better than a silky smooth native application cruising at 60fps, no hiccups, no unexpected behavior. There's just one issue... TIME.
Developing native apps take time and even though Apple and Google are creating frameworks and toolkits to improve the development process, it's still time consuming to building an app for both iPhone and Android. Frameworks like SwiftUI, toolkits like Storyboards and XIBs, can definitely speed up developing prototypes, proof-of-concepts, early-stage and mid-size applications although as things scale out, so do your options, thus your choices between Storyboards, XIBs, raw-framing, Auto Layout, SwiftUI become more pertinent to the long-term growth of your application. In most cases, you'd like to stick with some sort of pattern or system of techniques so your codebase doesn't turn into the wild west.
At that point, that's just the process of determining your navigation system. When you jump on Android, you'll need to determine your navigation paradigm there as well. Now times that by the ever-growing amount of problems, tasks, maintenance, updates you'll be responsible forward moving between both platforms. Now that will chew up a lot of your time.
Eventually, I had begun to grow tired of everything taking so much time. Yes, I had enough boilerplate and knowledge of which I could transfer between projects although that code inevitably becomes stale and the more you reuse code, the more volatile your projects become reducing their overall shelf-life.
This is where cross-platform comes into play. Technologies such as React Native and Flutter provide the option to write one codebase that will run on multiple platforms; a generalized abstraction layer on top of the native systems. These frameworks provide features such as hot reloading, remote debugging and over-the-air updates. The sum of these parts can help fine tune your time management while concurrently developing multi-platform mobile applications.
I've written various React Native applications over the last few years that are currently available in both the Google Play Store and App Store. For the sake of simplicity, I'm not going to review the pros and cons of native vs cross-platform. The point here is to express what I believe is an advantage of cross-platform technologies.
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