App development cost by platform

Best for

By far the largest global install base, and the only realistic choice for most of Asia, Africa and Latin America.

Watch for

Background execution is aggressively restricted and each vendor restricts it differently. Anything that must run reliably in the background needs foreground services, WorkManager and per-vendor testing.

Choose something else when

Your audience is US-only consumer with high spend per user — iOS usually monetises better and costs less to test.

Best for

A small, predictable device and OS matrix, which makes QA and support dramatically cheaper.

Watch for

You cannot ship outside the App Store on iOS in the US, so App Review is an unavoidable dependency in your release schedule.

Choose something else when

Your market is price-sensitive or outside North America and Western Europe, where Android share dominates.

Best for

One codebase for both mobile platforms at roughly 24% over a single native app, versus about 170% for two native builds.

Watch for

Anything touching hardware, background execution or platform-specific UI needs a native module, written twice, in a language your framework developers may not know.

Choose something else when

The product is the interface: high-performance graphics, camera pipelines, audio processing or intricate custom gestures.

Best for

The default form factor for field work, clinical settings, retail point-of-sale, warehouse operations, education and anything requiring signature capture or shared review.

Watch for

A tablet app is not a phone app with more padding. Multi-column layouts, split views, drag and drop, keyboard shortcuts and pointer support are new interaction design, and design cost rises more than engineering.

Choose something else when

Your usage is overwhelmingly on-the-go and single-task — you will pay for layouts almost nobody sees.

Best for

The right answer for long-session, high-density, keyboard-driven work — trading, design tools, clinical workstations, industrial control, editing.

Watch for

You own updates. There is no store to push through, so auto-update, rollback and version-skew handling are yours to build and are not optional for a product users keep open for months.

Choose something else when

A web app in a browser would do the job — which is most business software, and it saves you the entire distribution and update problem.

Best for

One codebase, every device, no store review, no commission, and you can ship a fix in minutes.

Watch for

No reliable background execution and weaker push support, particularly on iOS Safari, so notification-driven products are constrained.

Choose something else when

You need reliable push notifications to drive daily engagement.

Best for

Unmatched for passive capture and moment-of-need prompts: activity, heart rate, medication reminders, alerts, hands-free workflows.

Watch for

A watch is a glance-and-act surface. Interactions must complete in seconds, which means the product has to be genuinely rethought rather than shrunk.

Choose something else when

You do not already have a phone app — build that first, always.

Best for

The living room is where long-form viewing actually happens, and TV apps drive far higher watch time per user than mobile.

Watch for

Navigation is a directional remote, not touch. Every screen needs an explicit focus model, and getting focus order wrong makes an app unusable rather than awkward.

Choose something else when

Your content is short-form or your product is interactive — TV suits lean-back consumption.