jbzd

They are getting closer and closer so we're at a somewhere in the middle design where it doesn't really feel out of place on either platform. In some areas you can admittedly tell we leaned heavily towards iOS (i.e. pickers). Three factors led us this direction.

a) We're a small company, we can't make having separate android and ios teams feasible. Writing and maintaining a single code base and separating out ui/platform concerns from that was ideal.

b) User training is much simpler if the app walks and talks exactly the same way when you have a large number of not-necessarily-technical users. Especially when some of those users may have android phones and iOS tablets and hop between the two.

c) Similar to b, customer support is much simpler when things work the same way and look the same way, again, especially for not-necessarily-technical users. Sending screenshots, directing over the phone or email, etc, all get much much simpler.

We have an internal framework sitting on top of appcelerator's titanium that makes our app look at exactly the same on iOS and android. I mean exactly the same. The app specific code does not need to think about what platform it is on. We do this because titanium does some of the leg work but -rightfully- not all the leg work in achieving that. We get close to native code performance (better performance than Phonegap - tried that first - because its native controls). We have a large data layer and phonegap performance just degraded way too far with the amount of data in play that we needed.

I have a very similar hook in our apps for both sales demos as well as customer support. It's so much easier for our support people to help our customers (SaaS app dealing with lots of data, lots of views, etc) if they can see what they are looking at.