Create a Blended Team to Build Mobile Apps
Building iOS and Android apps with a single team
To build expert, mobile apps, you need mobile experts — if you are developing an app for both iOS and Android, you need experts in both iOS and Android. The Rolls-Royce approach is to create a sub-team of iOS specialists and a sub-team of Android specialists, each responsible for their own platforms. But mobile experts are expensive and hard to recruit, so to achieve this, you need a big budget, and power in the recruitment market.
If you don’t have the Rolls-Royce budget and recruiting power, you might turn to a cross-platform technology, such as React Native or Flutter. You still need mobile experts to build expert, mobile apps, but you need fewer of them, and you can create a smaller team around a single codebase. However, whilst cross-platform technologies are sometimes the right choice for a project, they often aren’t — I’ve written about the advantages and disadvantages of cross-platform technologies on the Infinity Works knowledge base.
The good news is that there is another approach that lets you build expert, mobile apps for both iOS and Android, with a smaller team and fewer experts, whilst leveraging the benefits of native mobile development. This approach uses what I call a blended team.
