Your customers need you on their phone, not in a browser.
This is the area where you don't have to take our word for it: you can download what we make. Jornia and LoverCast are our own products, in production, on Google Play. Nobody commissioned them and nobody reviews them: whether they're well or badly built is on us.
That includes the boring parts, which are the expensive ones: working without a connection, syncing between phone and TV without the user thinking about it, taking payments, and holding one codebase together across two very different screens.
We have no religion here. Native if the product lives off deep system integration; cross-platform if what matters is reaching two stores with a small team. The decision gets argued, not inherited.
Shipping to the store is the beginning. Reviews, minimum versions, OS migrations and the maintenance nobody puts in the budget.
Working in airplane mode isn't a checkbox: it shapes the entire architecture. You decide it at the start or you pay dearly for it later.
Our own product, in production. Download it and judge for yourself.
IPTV player and organiser for Android and Android TV.
A native Android trip planner.
If your product is used in a browser and you want an app «because you have to have an app». That's usually money thrown away.
If you need native iOS and Android, simultaneously and yesterday. With a small team that means picking one first.
If you expect to publish and forget. The stores force you to maintain, and that cost is real.
If you recognise yourself here, tell us anyway. I'd rather point you somewhere else in an email than have us both find out halfway through the project.