Tools that will create key user interaction experience

Cross-platform development for your development apps are a framework for building your product across multiple web, mobile, and over-the-top (OTT) services. When users interact with your product, their experience needs to be the same across every platform they use. Following a well-defined cross-platform development process ensures you’re building a consistent experience, while also making it easier for your team to execute on their work.

The process of developing on these different platforms is traditionally very time-consuming. It would require your engineering team to write code for each app individually. This fragmentation leaves your product open for technical issues as each member of your team is working on something different. When you’re disconnected like this, it’s easy to miss out on valuable context from their peers.

Cross-platform development tools help you reduce the risk of these issues while also making it easier to release products faster, without sacrificing quality.

Benefits of a Cross-Platform Development Process

Cross-platform apps allow you can respond to customers and market changes more quickly. They enable you to build a reputation for being trustworthy and customer-centric. The efficiency of cross-platform apps also makes them great for maintenance and support. You can update all of your apps with bug fixes and new features. Then push them to all of your devices, regardless of the operating system.

Recycle Code

Being cross-platform is beneficial since you’re able to reuse code. Developers can create one code base for different platforms. This simplifies the development process and speeds up the application development life cycle.

Code reuse makes developers’ lives much easier. Developers don’t have to write natively for each operating system or acquire skills for all of the cross-platform development tools needed to support every mobile device. Reusable code means you can make enhancements and fixes for all platforms at once, rather than individually.

Minimize Costs

Cross-platform application development is more economical than building two separate apps due to the sharing of common resources. Sharing resources across two apps can reduce the cost and make it easier to find skilled developers. The cross-platform framework technology makes it possible for one team to build both apps simultaneously.

Speed to Market

Cross-platform app development cuts down on the time it takes to develop products. Shared codebases make it easier to develop apps, and frameworks like React Native or Flutter enable developers to build and deploy them faster.

With cross-platform mobile app development, businesses are able to provide customers with the best possible experience of their products. A cross-platform mobile app is developed to work on multiple devices. Before building a mobile app, one first has to consider the devices it will be supported on.

Larger reach

Your cross-platform development will get you to a wider, broader market. If you’re building a single native application, you’re only reaching a small part of the market. But with a cross-platform application, you can reach a much wider customer base and improve your brand engagement and bottom line.

What it Means to Be Cross-platform

Creating a truly cross-platform product is all about being all the places your customers are. Rather than building a solution for your mobile app development, a different one for your website, and even a third for your TV app, you use the same product across all three. This makes it easier to develop a seamless experience for your customers as well as your team.

Adopting a cross-platform development process changes the way you think about building products for your customers. Instead of spending your team finding different tools to provide the best experience on each platform, your search is focused on finding a single solution that spans all relevant platforms. This cuts down on:

• The time it takes to find the right tools for a project,
• The complexity of your company’s toolset, and
• The resources required to complete a project.

Being able to streamline your development in this way is a definite value add for your team. Whether you’re just starting out as a product manager and developer, or onboarding new members to the team, using a cross-platform tool helps you move faster. Instead of spending your time teaching your team how to gain competency across a number of tools, you can double down on one cross-platform tool and spend your time focusing on other aspects of the development process.

The right cross-platform development tools will give you the ability to create mobile apps for iOS and Android as well as web applications, OTT streaming apps, and browsers. Look for tools that help you develop seamlessly across multiple platforms and integrate with your current tech stack. The framework you choose may not check all those boxes at once, so it’s important to find the balance between what works for your team and what works with your existing technology.

A big part of that decision will be impacted by the metrics you want to track. Being able to create a seamless experience across multiple platforms is more complex, so it requires more granular tracking.

Determine Which Metrics Provide the Most Insight

When you’re developing across multiple apps and operating systems, gathering actionable data can be an arduous task. The key is prioritizing meaningful metrics for tracking performance across your website, mobile, and OTT apps.

An essential metric to track is user adoption rates across each platform. It’s a leading indicator of changing user behavior and potential underlying issues.

Let’s say you’re an email marketing company building an iOS and Android app that helps customers create templated emails on their mobile devices. Both apps were released simultaneously on each platform, but user adoption rates are much higher for iOS users than Android. With that information, your team can dig into the overall experience for each app and investigate with the Android version.

But user adoption rates are just a jumping-off point. There are more granular metrics that provide insight into the cross-platform experience. Determining which metrics matter for your company requires a deep understanding of your users’ needs.

Take Slack, for example. Their popular messaging platform spans desktop, iOS, and Android applications. To unify their cross-platform reporting, Slack’s engineering team decided to use two very specific metrics:

• Time to Visible (TTV) – The time it takes from when the app is launched to when it displays locally cached content.
• Time to Usable (TTU) – The time it takes from when the app is launched to when it displays the most recent content.

For Slack’s users, being able to interact with up-to-date content is a key component of their experience. Both TTV and TTU give the engineering team at Slack a deeper understanding of how that experience changes across every touch point. A decrease to TTV can indicate an in-app performance issue, while a decrease in TTU might indicate cloud services issues. Based on these metrics, the Slack team can prioritize their time and resources to ensure content stays up-to-date for users.

Content display times won’t necessarily be the most relevant metric for every team. If you’re building a language-learning app like Duolingo, it makes more sense to focus on engagement metrics like daily and monthly active users. Whatever your business model, leveraging the relevant metrics can help you create a better cross-platform development experience.

Use a tool like Geckoboard to collect and display these metrics in a single dashboard. This view keeps the information top of mind and makes it easier for you to track minute changes over time.

Run Tests Continuously to Refine Your Product

A/B testing and push notification management empower developers to investigate new ways to improve the cross-platform experience. And with Taplytics, you can create these experiments across web, app, and OTT from a single platform.

Let’s go back to Duolingo as an example. As a language learning tool, users need to interact with Duolingo every day to gain fluency and become sticker users. The company could run tests to see how they might increase the percentage of daily active users (DAU) across every version of their app.

Using Taplytics, they could create two variations of a push notification that encourages daily user engagement.

Push notification management via Taplytics.

Let’s say Duolingo already sends notifications that let the customer know how many consecutive days they’ve taken a quiz on the app. These notifications tell users they’ll break their learning streak by not engaging with the app today.

To run a test, Duolingo might experiment by sending this notification at different times across the mobile or desktop experience. The company would need to analyze the historical data for the target testing group and determine when each user typically engages with the app. Once they figure out which time of day is best for each person, they can send the notification out according to those findings. If the change in delivery time caused a significant increase to DAU, that indicates a shift in user behavior. Duolingo’s developers could then get to work rolling out the updated schedule and delivery method to all other customers based on their individual habits.

As a result of running these tests, Duolingo also gained a lot of important context on how different types of customers engage with their app. That data can be used by other teams to create a better cross-platform experience in terms of product messaging and marketing as well.

Get Other Teams Involved in The Process

Your engineering team can’t work in a vacuum. As you build out a defined cross-platform development process, it’s important to get members of product, marketing, sales, and support involved as well. Each member of the company can provide valuable insight into how the customer experience changes across web, mobile, and OTT.

One way to do this is by creating a cross-functional team or standing meeting that highlights areas of opportunity when everyone can work together. In those meetings, developers can share data about user behavior that product managers can use to refine their strategy and roadmap. And those product managers can turn around and use the roadmap to help marketing plan their upcoming campaigns, or give sales and support a sneak peek they can share with customers.

Our Duolingo example from the previous section is a great opportunity to showcase how these teams can come together to create better experiences for users. Let’s say their marketing team wanted to test the streak notification messaging in both the iOS and Android apps. Developers could create an A/B test to track which type of content encouraged individual users to take action on each platform. If the new notifications result in a significant increase to DAU, the company could incorporate the new messaging in the app and campaigns to boost engagement.

Cross-Platform Development Builds More Cohesive Products

When you’re developing across multiple platforms at the same time, it can be difficult to ensure a great experience for every customer touch point. Understanding what goes into the cross-platform development process is the first step toward creating a more unified product for your customers. When you’re able to see the connections between each platform clearly, it’s easy to make decisions based on how they all build toward a singular goal. And that clarity helps you create a unified product experience that’s much easier for your developers and the rest of your team.