The number of companies doing mobile software development is rapidly increasing. Any company, even one that is past the proof of concept stage, will face following challenge — how to make sure the mobile product covers as much user base as possible. The two most commonly accepted options are:
1) Use of some cross platform development tools and frameworks like Titanium, Phone Gap, Xamarin (there are few more to name).
2) Use dedicated platform specific dev teams (one team per platform).

If you are adventurous and are starting fresh, the chance is you will go with option one.
If you are an established company with a steady revenue stream or have solid venture backing, you can afford the option two.

Both option have pros and cons.
Option one seems like a very reasonable choice, however your developers end up having to learn a framework like Titanium or PhoneGap and on top of that exposure to Android ad iOS skills will be necessary at some point anyways.
On the other hand, the second option, is arguably more expensive. In the long run, the first option will cost you just as much if not more in maintenance and in having to come up with platform specific hacks.

I would like to propose a third option, which will address the weaknesses of the previous two approaches.

There is huge value in building cross functional teams; I’m coming from a web development background. If you have the team, in which every developer can comfortably write CSS/JS/HTML as well as optimize SQL DB tables, that would be the most winning combination. Obviously, some people will be naturally better at the presentation front, while others will be more excited working with DB, but as long as anyone can cover for anyone else on the team — we are good.

The option that I’m proposing for cross platform mobile development is to build cross functional mobile development teams (X-platform team). Every developer on the team must learn at least 2 major mobile platforms — iOS and Android.

The company I’m currently working for was going through the same challenge as described above — using cross platform frameworks or hiring more mobile developers to maintain reasonable speed of delivery to cost ratio. While I’m not actively writing code any more (after more then 20 years in the trenches, I finally moved up the rank to a management position), I have decided to run a software development experiment to better understand the challenges of my company.

Just like most of us these days, I had an idea for a mobile app. Coming from WEB application development, I was initially hesitant to start learning a whole new programming concepts for mobile, and on top of that having to learn 2 platforms and 1 whole new language was some how not very appealing. At first, I was trying to get some friends, that already do mobile development, to get excited about my idea. But as you may have guessed, my attempt to employ them for free, did not have much success.

Finally, I realized — if no one will do it for me, the only option I have is to do it all myself.

So I challenged myself into learning iOS and Android. It took me a while (almost a year) -- I’m not as sharp any more and can only work on this pet project after hours. Along the way, just for the heck of it, I also implemented the backend Restful API in clojure (was always curious about functional programming, but could never find reasonable motivation to learn it). So, here is what I’ve learned doing all that:

Learning new development concepts these days is way different than it was 10-20 years ago. Back then, you would typically buy a book to get started. These days — there are simply no books that would be able a adjust to your personal learning abilities and style. And if you are short on time, you simply can’t afford to spend few weeks on studying a book. After doing some research, I ended up buying a few (I thought) best books on iOS development. But instead, I ended up watching free recordings of Stanford University’s lectures https://www.linkedin.com/groups/how-watch-online-IOSX-lectures-4856308.S.5791999172118851585?qid=efb3f917-2328-4b35-9b6c-a2a8a8f5781c&trk=groups_most_recent-0-b-ttl&goback=%2Egmr_4856308. I watched these recording at 2x (some parts 4x) speed which worked really well for me. I started watching the old version of the lectures for iOS 6, then the iOS 7 version came out and I had to continue on with that (often unlearning or relearning some previously learned concepts).

The most difficult part was to come up with reasonable MVC like approach so that I would be able to read my own code few days later and understand what’s going on. Learning Objective C blocks was scary at first, but at the end I really appreciated how non blocking UI (which is huge conceptual requirement for mobile apps in comparison to typical web app) can be implemented with Objective C blocks. Later I learned that in Android you can achieve the same thing by overriding methods dynamically, which is very different, but at the end was serving the same purpose. I could employ these different coding constructs in two different platforms without changing the structure of the application.

I ended up separating all backend access logic into functor classes with a bunch of static methods. This way I was able to keep the UI logic totally separate from the business logic; as it should be. In order to avoid low level networking coding, I chose the AFNetworking library, which was an excellent choice, though, as I was preparing for my first release, the AFNetworking 2.0 version came out which was quite different from the first version, so I had no choice but to migrate to the latest and greatest. Having to upgrade to a non backwards compatible version of the library the last minute is not the most pleasant experience — but I would highly recommend doing it, the benefits of not having to maintain the old legacy library outweigh the time and effort spent.