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What horror stories have you had with cross platform tools that made you wish you used native?

• I'm a developer for mobile devices and wondering about native and cross-platform app development. For most apps, wouldn't the benefit of 3+ platforms outweigh any slight complications due to using native? Mobile dev: native or cross-platform (eg Unity, AIR, Web-App). I'm off to a good start with Android dev, but why, actually, shouldn't we build MyApp using a cross-platform tool like a web-app, Adobe AIR, or Unity*? It seems it would take the same amount of time, and we'd have multiple platforms in 1 go just in case we want to release to iOS very fast, or even first. It's such a pain to build the same thing 2+ times, and frankly, doesn't always happen in a lot of companies. There are a few very small drawbacks** to those cross-platforms, but pretty much all can be overcome pretty easily in our case, it seems. I'm leaning towards Unity for apps where web-browser is not very important, and Adobe AIR or web-app otherwise. Anyone given these topics much thought?: *Unity: (I don't mind paying the tool's purchase price, or use any other cross-platform tool) *Cocos: why use it when you can use Unity instead (which even supports web-browsers on all platforms (not to mention xbox, playstation, nintendo etc etc) *Adobe Air: AKA Flash-app-in-a-standalone-box with a different name that Steve Jobs didn't poop on. Main benefit over Unity is higher web-browser-presence, but we aren't really focusing on web atm. Not sure what if any downsides in relation to Unity in terms of 2D. 'Flash' is certainly made easy dev for 2D. **Unity: No extensive GUI layout tools, but I often prefer coding GUIs without these anyhow. Maybe a little harder to do/find documentation on platform-specific tasks e.g. in-app purchases (I see there are some Unity plugins for that though) **web-app (html/javascript/angular, etc), a bit of speed (noticeable is our case?), a little hoop to make in-app purchases from webkit to rest of api, appearance on different mobile and other browsers? Anyone can get your javascript and copy the look, though not 2-way functionality (as they don't have the server code). That's probably not really an issue. Thoughts?

• Answer:

  I don't have any horror stories to share. If you are making a game, then absolutely use an engine like Unity. If it is only a 2D game, then other engines might be better or if it is simple enough (Flappy Bird) then native might be fine. If you are not making a game and not making anything that involves movement through a virtual space, then Unity is probably not a good choice. If you are building a non-game that uses standard UI components, lists, buttons, switches, etc, then native gives the best performance over HTML5/Phone Gap style cross platform approaches, although those tools have their ardent supporters as well. It takes some work to get web based apps to be so good you can't tell they are web based. But it can certainly be done.