I have been developing cross-platform mobile apps for the past five years, initially on Phonegap and for the last three years, on Titanium (Appcelerator).
If I was starting from scratch today, I'd take a good look at Titanium, React, Xamarin and Ruby Motion (in that order). In general, I think cross platform will save you time and money if you do it properly.
Titanium has been a timesaver for me. My current backend (stocklight.com) is written in Rails. For iOS and Android clients, Titanium gives me about 90% code reuse on the front-end.
ie. It allows you to implement cross platform GUI's using the same view code and you just make platform specific adjustments (eg. Action Bar versus NavigationWindow) where neccessary.
There's no way I would have had time to develop both backend and android/iOS by myself if I had to write everything natively.
Having a single model/controller layer with Titanium has been good also but I recently made the effort to upgrade this part of the project to use Alloy and that has felt very Rails-ish which has been a big improvement.
This week, Appcelerator have announced their new pricing structure ($39 per month) and are pushing a new service called Arrow for managing your back end. Personally, I don't think i'll be using Arrow (Rails seems like a better choice) but it will be great to get LiveView 'instant updates' with their new SDK.
Also, re. speeding up Android development, you should definitely check out Genymotion.
If I was starting from scratch today, I'd take a good look at Titanium, React, Xamarin and Ruby Motion (in that order). In general, I think cross platform will save you time and money if you do it properly.
Titanium has been a timesaver for me. My current backend (stocklight.com) is written in Rails. For iOS and Android clients, Titanium gives me about 90% code reuse on the front-end.
ie. It allows you to implement cross platform GUI's using the same view code and you just make platform specific adjustments (eg. Action Bar versus NavigationWindow) where neccessary.
There's no way I would have had time to develop both backend and android/iOS by myself if I had to write everything natively.
Having a single model/controller layer with Titanium has been good also but I recently made the effort to upgrade this part of the project to use Alloy and that has felt very Rails-ish which has been a big improvement.
This week, Appcelerator have announced their new pricing structure ($39 per month) and are pushing a new service called Arrow for managing your back end. Personally, I don't think i'll be using Arrow (Rails seems like a better choice) but it will be great to get LiveView 'instant updates' with their new SDK.
Also, re. speeding up Android development, you should definitely check out Genymotion.