Best way to do cross-mobile app

Question

More and more clients wants to have cross-mobile apps (mainly the combination of Android, iPhone and BB).

What's the best way to do it?

1. Use multi-platform tools like PhoneGap or similar? This tool introduces another layer and the developer would depend on it.

2. Hire 3 developers to develop the app for each platform? This is costly.

3. Something else?

Answer 1

Develop a web app optimized for mobile browsers.

If you must develop a native app, don't assume that 3 apps = 3 times the cost. Lessons learned from the first version of the app will make it faster to develop subsequent versions. This is especially true if you can leverage reusable components. For instance, I've developed a cross-platform app in which a web service does the majority of the heavy lifting. Each of the native apps was mostly UI code.

Answer 2

As you said:

Quick & cheap & limited - option 1.

Fullfeatured & custom-designed & costly - option 2.

You choose.

For me - I hate crappy mobile apps so I'd never go with option 1. The competition is so big that if you think of making something mediocre then better not even start.

If you need something quick: as @dbyrne noted, create a dedicated full-featured mobile web page. This will be fast and a lot of users prefer good mobile page to yet another application on the mobile phone.