Half your users are on iPhone. The other half are not. You build for both.
Native apps from one codebase that ship to both stores at once, feel native on each, and do not make you fund two teams to get there.
In lockstep
One action. Both phones. Same result, same instant. That is what one codebase buys you.
The problem
Building the same app twice is a tax you do not have to pay.
There are two phones in the world that matter, and your users are split between them. Build for one and you have shipped half a product. Build for both the usual way and you are now paying for two codebases, two teams, and two copies of the same bug, one of which is always a version behind.
That tax is real and it compounds. Every feature gets built twice. Every fix gets made twice, or worse, once, on whichever platform someone remembered. The two apps slowly drift apart until "the iPhone version" and "the Android version" are two different products wearing the same logo.
We do not pay that tax, and neither should you. One codebase, written once, compiled to genuinely native apps on both platforms. One feature, one fix, one timeline, shipped to both stores at the same time. Native where it counts, shared where it does not, and no version that quietly falls behind.
Maybe that is you right now. A small change landed on Android last sprint, the iPhone build never got it, and a customer just emailed a screenshot asking why their phone is missing a button their colleague has. You open two repositories to fix one thing. You ship two updates to two review queues that move at different speeds. For a few days the two apps disagree in public, and you are the one explaining why. That is the tax. It does not show up on an invoice, it shows up in your week.
The part nobody warns you about
"Syncs when the signal comes back" is hiding the hardest problem in the app.
Caching data so the app works on a dead train is the easy half. The hard half starts when two people edit the same thing while both are offline. One marks the order shipped on the warehouse floor with no signal. The other cancels the same order from the office. Both phones think they are right. Then both reconnect within a minute of each other. Now the server has two truths for one record, and something has to decide which one wins. That something is code you have to write on purpose, because the network will not decide it for you.
The lazy answer is last write wins: whichever edit reaches the server last quietly overwrites the other. It is one line of logic and it silently deletes someone's work. The person whose change vanished does not get an error. They just notice, days later, that the thing they did is gone, and they stop trusting the app. It is one of the most common ways a solid app quietly loses the people who use it most.
There are real techniques for this. Conflict-free data types, the family known as CRDTs, let two offline copies merge back into one without losing edits, and they are genuinely good at it. But they only settle the shape of the data, not the meaning. A CRDT can merge two lists. It cannot tell you whether a shipped order is allowed to be cancelled, or who had permission to do either. That decision is your business rules, and it belongs to you, not to a library.
So we treat sync as a design question we answer before we write it, not a bug we patch after launch. For each piece of data we ask what should happen when two devices disagree: does the newest edit win, do they merge, or does a human have to choose. Some conflicts are fine to resolve automatically. Some have to be shown to a person, because the app is not allowed to guess. Deciding which is which, up front, is the work. An app that handles a clean connection is a demo. An app that handles a messy reconnection is a product.
How we build it
One source of truth. Two native apps.
Native on both platforms from a single source. These are the habits that keep it feeling native instead of feeling like a compromise nobody asked for.
One codebase, both stores
We write the app once and ship it as genuinely native apps on both platforms, not a website hidden inside a phone-shaped wrapper. The shared code is the screens, the logic, and the rules that are the same everywhere. Where a platform genuinely differs, a date picker, a share sheet, a permission prompt, we drop down to the native piece for that platform and keep the rest shared. One feature, built one time, lands on iPhone and Android together. You stop paying for the same work twice and you stop discovering that the two versions quietly disagree. A solid cross-platform approach buys you this, and we pick the one that fits your app rather than the one that is trending.
Native because it is, not because it fakes it
Smooth scrolling, real gestures, the back button that behaves the way the platform expects, the keyboard that does not fight the user. The shared layer gets you ninety percent of the way for a fraction of the cost. The last ten percent, the part that makes an app feel like it belongs on the phone instead of visiting it, is where the real effort goes, and we spend it there on purpose. A list that drops frames as you fling it, a transition that stutters, a tap that lands a beat late: people cannot always name why an app feels cheap, but they feel it in the first ten seconds and they judge the whole product on it. We build for that first ten seconds.
Offline is a feature, not an error screen
Phones lose signal in elevators, subways, basements, and on the train your user takes every morning. An app that turns into a spinner the moment the bars drop is an app people stop trusting. We design for offline first: the data lives on the device, every action is recorded as something to send later, and the screen keeps responding whether the bars are full or gone. It keeps working, holds what you did, and reconciles with the server the moment the connection comes back. How that reconciliation handles two people editing at once is its own decision, and we make it before we ship, not after a complaint.
The boring plumbing, done right
Push notifications, deep links, login, in-app purchases, permissions, and the store review process. Every one of these is platform-specific, fiddly, and famous for taking three times as long as anyone budgeted. A push token has to survive reinstalls. A deep link has to open the right screen even from a cold start. A permission prompt asked at the wrong moment gets denied forever, and on both platforms a denied permission is a setting the user has to dig out by hand. None of it is glamorous and all of it sinks launches when it is skipped or rushed. We treat the unglamorous plumbing as part of the product, because to the user, an app that cannot log in is not an app.
On a real device the same week
We get the app onto internal test tracks on both stores early, through TestFlight on iOS and the equivalent track on Google Play, so you are tapping a real build on a real phone in week one, not squinting at a simulator and hoping. A simulator runs on your fast laptop with a full battery and perfect network. It will never show you the cold start that takes too long on a three-year-old phone, the layout that breaks on a small screen, or the feature that dies the moment the OS decides to reclaim memory. Problems that only show up on actual hardware show up while there is still time to fix them cheaply.
Built for the phone they actually own
The phone on your desk is new, fast, charged, and on Wi-Fi. Your user's phone is two or three years old, low on storage, running an OS version a generation or more behind, on a flaky connection, in battery saver mode. Most Android users are not on the newest version of Android, and a large share are several versions back, so an app tested only on the latest is an app tested on almost nobody. We build and test against the low end on purpose: keep the download small so it installs over cellular, keep cold start quick so it opens before patience runs out, and respect battery and background limits so the system does not quietly kill the app. The phone that proves it works is the cheap one, not the demo one.
"Two codebases means two places for every bug to hide and two teams arguing about which one is right. One codebase ends the argument before it starts."
What you get
Two apps. One team. One timeline.
Everything handed over so you own it: the code, the store listings, and the pipeline that ships them. No mystery only we can rebuild.
- One codebase that builds to native iOS and Android, with no duplicate work
- Both app store listings prepared, configured, and submitted for review
- Signed, automated builds so every release is one repeatable step, not a ritual
- Push notifications, deep links, and login wired in and tested on real devices
- Crash reporting and analytics, so you see problems before your reviews do
- Offline behavior designed in, with sync that resolves cleanly when signal returns
- The full repository and documentation, so any developer can keep shipping
Not sure if your app should be cross-platform or fully native? Tell us what it has to do and we will give you the honest answer, even when it is not us.
Invoke usIs this the right call
When this fits.
Good fit
- You need to be on both iOS and Android and do not want to fund two separate teams
- Your users keep asking for an app and a mobile website is no longer enough
- Your current app is a slow web page in a wrapper, and people can feel it
- You want to be on real phones in testing within weeks, not at the very end
Wrong call
- You need a deep, hardware-specific capability that only a fully native team can reach. We will tell you honestly when that line is crossed.
- You are building a high-end 3D game. That belongs on a game engine, not here.
- You will only ever support one platform, forever. A single-platform native build may be simpler, and we will say so.
Deployment and scale
From your machine to both stores.
Getting an app into the stores is its own discipline, and it is where a lot of launches stall. We handle the signing, the certificates, the listings, the review notes, and the back-and-forth with two review teams that do not always agree. You get an app that is actually live, not one stuck in "pending" for a week.
Releases run through an automated build, so shipping an update is one repeatable step instead of a nervous afternoon on someone's laptop. Crash reporting tells you when something broke in the wild, with a trail to the cause, not just a one-star review that says "keeps closing."
Rollout is staged on purpose. A new version reaches a slice of users first, so if something is wrong it is caught at one percent, not a hundred. As your user base grows, the same app and the same pipeline carry it without a rebuild.
What we settle before we begin: which platforms and which OS versions you support, what has to keep working with no signal, and which native capabilities the app actually needs. Everything else follows from those three.
Tell us who your users are and what they carry.
Describe the app, who it is for, and the phones in their pockets. We will tell you whether one codebase covers it, what it takes to ship to both stores, and the shortest honest path to a real app on a real device.