In today's competitive landscape, mobile app developers face the challenge of maintaining feature parity across different platforms like iOS and Android. Feature parity is the concept of ensuring that a feature is released simultaneously on all platforms, keeping them in sync with their capabilities. While hybrid frameworks offer one way to achieve this, they come with several downsides. In this blog post, we'll explore an alternative approach to achieving feature parity that has proven effective in both smaller firms and large organizations like Google.
The Cross-Platform Approach to Feature Parity
Instead of relying on hybrid frameworks, this approach divides the work among engineers based on the features rather than the platforms. Each engineer is responsible for building a feature on their dominant platform (e.g., iOS) and then porting it to the other platform(s) with guidance from colleagues. This process often leads to a better understanding of the task, resulting in higher quality software, feature parity, and a more flexible and responsive team.
Benefits of the Cross-Platform Approach
- Higher Quality Software: By working on both platforms, engineers gain a deeper understanding of the feature they're building. This often leads to improvements on the original platform, resulting in higher-quality software overall.
- Feature Parity: As engineers are responsible for implementing the feature on all platforms, they ensure that the same functionality is available on each platform simultaneously, achieving true feature parity.
- Increased Team Flexibility: With this approach, engineers become familiar with both platforms, making the team more versatile and able to respond quickly to any issues that may arise.
- Streamlined Communication: Having one engineer handle a feature across platforms reduces communication overhead and the need for extensive coordination between platform-specific teams.
Challenges of the Cross-Platform Approach
While the cross-platform approach offers several benefits, it's important to note that this method typically requires more senior-level engineers. These experienced engineers are better equipped to navigate the challenges of working with different platforms and can effectively troubleshoot issues that arise during the development process.
Conclusion
The cross-platform approach to achieving feature parity provides a proven strategy for developing high-quality software with simultaneous feature releases on multiple platforms. By dividing the work based on features rather than platforms, this method fosters a more flexible, responsive, and skilled development team. However, it's essential to ensure that your team comprises experienced engineers capable of handling the challenges presented by working across multiple platforms.