Cross-platform mobile development frameworks?

[MadFruit]

The company I'm due to start work with soon currently has a mobile development team and apparently they develop apps natively on each platform; the way it was described to me sounded like the code for both (all?) platforms was written simultaneously by a developer. Sounds like hell to me.

I've not done mobile development in any serious fashion (had a small play around with Android) but I'm aware of multiple cross-platform mobile development frameworks/tools. These generally seem to be a web stack set of languages. To the uninitiated, this would seem to have a serious impact on what you can achieve - but some have a pretty good rep, while acknowledging that they're not "there yet".

Does anyone here have experience of development in multiple mobile platforms - and how do you do it? Keeping in mind, these applications are for a world wide brand that everyone here will have heard of, if not used, and security and connectivity is a serious issue.

 

[MadFruit]

Sounds like a job for Xamarin!

This is interesting, I'd not heard of this before. Writing in C# is far more appealing than web languages.

As long as the products are the same and offer the same functionality i'd choose native over cross platform as long as dev costs aren't an issue.

Aren't dev costs always an issue really? What about code duplicity, maintenance, testing etc. The more duplicate effort there is, the more opportunity for bugs - and the more redundancy in effort.

I'm really after reasons why people see writing the same thing twice for different platforms as preferable to something like Xamarin? Where are the current pitfalls - are they really so huge as to actually make writing the same thing N time preferable? What about in companies where you have an Android team and a iOS team, so they write the same thing completely independently (and thus completely different code bases and solutions to produce the same thing)?