Multi-platform support is a management call, not just a dev problem

I once talked with someone from an advertising agency about an app and got the comment: “iOS-only is unthinkable, right off the bat. No way.”

For developers, on the other hand, how much of a hassle Android support is is something we feel in our bones.

The reason is that Android comes in a huge variety of devices, with all kinds of screen dimensions and aspect ratios, and in some cases the OS itself has been customized at the software level. Ensuring consistent quality across all of that takes an enormous amount of effort.

Right now there are broadly two standard approaches.

One is to minimize native app code. Concretely, this means using something like WebView to achieve display and behavior that’s as reproducible as possible across platforms.

But this approach has its limits. It often turns out that you still have to write at least some minimum of native code, or that achieving elaborate behavior ends up requiring you to write almost everything in a platform-dependent way after all.

The other option is to spend a lot of money and recoup a lot of money.

This is a decision made at the layer of management strategy, not development strategy. It’s the simple brute-force approach of securing double the headcount and double the budget and handling both platforms. As long as you run the numbers, you can make the call. Convert the “unthinkable” that the advertising agency person mentioned into a dollar figure, and you can properly calculate whether multi-platform support is a loss or a gain.

Lately, though, I feel like a third option has been shown to the world.

That’s Clubhouse. Clubhouse is (was) an iOS-only app. I assume it will eventually support Android, but for now it has narrowed its target to iOS users. It’s been a while since I’ve seen an app in the SNS category that isn’t multi-platform.

I think the reason is obvious. It saves resources, and when you prioritize the quality of the experience, it’s easier to maintain consistency by designing the app’s behavior on top of the unified concept and design of iOS devices. To get a bit more into the weeds, Apple devices have fairly strict rules around communication and audio specifications, and behavior is standardized. In that sense, Clubhouse, which bills itself as an audio SNS, was able to decide to give up on Android users for the time being in order to fully do what it wanted to do.

This situation reminded me all over again how important it is, for a startup in the process of growing, to decide the direction in which to compete and the timing at which to compete.

Originally published in Japanese at https://clazytech.com/2021/08/503/. Translated with LLM assistance and reviewed before publication.