Cross-Platform App

A cross-platform app is one system that shows up in three places. The same customer can open it in a browser on a laptop, on an Android phone and on an iPhone. Behind all three sits one set of records.

That last part is the whole point. A booking made on an iPhone at nine in the morning is on the office laptop at nine in the morning. Nobody copies anything and nobody waits. The staff list, the prices, the customers and the reports live in one place, and each device is simply a window onto it.

What is genuinely shared is the part nobody sees. The records, the rules that guard them and the reports built on top. Write the rule that a class holds twelve people once, and it holds on every device. Change a price once, and every screen shows the new one. Correct a report once, and it is correct for everybody. That is where the saving comes from, and it is a real saving.

What is not shared is the screen itself. Each phone has its own habits, from how the back button behaves to how a date is chosen and how the keyboard hides the field you are typing in. Someone still has to build, test and adjust on both an Android phone and an iPhone. Each store has its own review, its own rules and its own yearly fee. Anyone who tells you the second phone is free has never published an app.

The honest trade against a fully native app, one written separately for each phone, is polish against price. Native work is still better for heavy graphics, constant camera use and long jobs that run in the background, and it gets new phone features first. Cross-platform gives you both phones for close to the price of one, which is enough for bookings, orders, stock, forms and messages. Linkysoft argues for native only when the app has to do something the device makes hard.

Linkysoft usually builds the core as a web application first and then puts the phone screens around those same records, rather than starting again. Ask any supplier one question before you sign. What exactly gets written twice? The answer tells you what the second phone really costs, and it is the first thing our mobile app developers put in writing.