Macadamian Blog

Long-term Platform Strategy Cuts Costs of Application Development

While products that get to market quickly may initially be a success with users, if they were not built with a sound long-term strategy, they can easily end up costing orders of magnitude more for your organization to maintain in the long run.

Consider vendors who quickly developed a native application to run on the iPhone in 2009. With the explosion of Android, they are now looking at “porting” their application to Android. Except that Android offers a very different user experience, and a “port” ends up being almost a re-write. Then, an HTC Android phone is very different from an Android Honeycomb tablet, so you may need to do two re-writes. Each one needs to be tested. Costs begin to snowball. For organizations that have carefully surveyed the market and know which platforms and form factors they plan to support for the longer term, it is vital to be clear on a long-term development strategy, including UX, Engineering and QA considerations. For example:

• Do you build a web application or a series of native platform applications?
• Do you use a cross-platform framework like PhoneGap, Titanium, or SproutCore?
• What is your UX strategy to support Android (and even iOS) variations and fragmentation?
• Which subset of platforms, form factors, and emulators will QA test on?
• How will you push and maintain upgrades across different platforms?