So, you want to build a tech start-up. You have your product idea, your seed capital, and your founding team. Now you just have to hire three engineering teams and build three versions of your product. Surprised?

Let us count them down. A website, obviously, that’s one. An iOS app that works on iPhones, that’s two. And an Android app that works on all the other smartphones, that’s three. Each one requires knowledge of different technology stacks and programming languages, so you need three engineering teams, or at the very least three engineering ninjas, each with total mastery over each of those respective areas.

Your seemingly straightforward path to minimally viable product has just gotten three times thornier, with impacts to resources, costs, and timelines. And that’s before a single line of code has been written.

It Used to Be Easy

Mark Zuckerberg sitting in his Harvard dorm room did not have to worry about hacking together three separate versions of Facebook. Larry Page and Sergey Brin, grabbing coffee in Palo Alto, did not have to worry about ranking anything other than websites. And Jeff Bezos working out of his garage did not have to pay for three separate Amazon online bookstores.

The rise of smartphones and mobile app stores has brought a new reality to the internet. Companies across every industry have recognized that customers demand an omnichannel gateway. We all want to move from laptop to tablet to smartphone and back again with no degradation in user experience.

What has been a win for consumers has also created a barrier to entry for start-ups. It used to be that a single engineer could build a new port of call for the entire world because the entire world came visiting on the same type of boat — the browser. No longer. Now some come by browser, some by mobile browser, and many on smartphones, expecting a native app experience.

#react-native #flutter #startup #engineering #cross-platform