(2017-03-05) Strategies For Building A Dual Platform Mobile App The Hello Weather Experiment

Strategies for building a dual-platform mobile app – The Hello Weather Experiment

Want your app to coexist on iOS and Android? Here are a few tips to speed up your process and make it happen.

1. Dead simple tools

Under the covers, Hello Weather is a basic Ruby on Rails app, and simple bare-metal iOS and Android apps. There’s no fluff whatsoever — no React Native, no extra frameworks, no microservices, or any other layers of abstraction.

2. Stock UI components.

3. WEBVIEWS WEBVIEWS WEBVIEWS

That cut our effort by 80% or more, and from the customer’s perspective it doesn’t matter at all.

4. Maximize team independence

We added a special developer mode inside the apps, which gives us a way to quickly try new stuff internally without exposing it to customers.

Now I don’t have to generate test builds if I’m making webview changes — I just flag things as dev-only in the Rails app, flip a switch, and the new stuff is on my phone in short order.

5. Say no to everything you don’t want to do.

Within two minutes we chose to skip that pain and simply require Android 6+.