Hello,

Let me please cite a piece of my company's blog article about developing two versions of the same app.

Don’t apply the same UI principles for different platforms. It is always good to have a principle as a foundation and do things according to this principle. This is what our team has done using the principle: “consistent design across all platforms”. We tried to design one mobile app for two different platform (iOS and Android) in the same way. Although it sounds good there were some serious side effects. The process of UI design became a battle between developers of these two platforms. For example, swipe on a cell inside a list is a really easy job for iOS app developers. But for Android developers the implementation of the swipes is quite tricky. Most importantly it is not what users of Android apps are used to. On Android it is supposed that the drop down menu is attached to each cell in the list.

At the same time if you design an app using just standard controls then your users don’t need to learn how to use it. In other words, borrowing UI approaches from built-in apps like calendar, email and notes is a right way to go. However a side effect of such an approach is the same app on different platforms does not look and behave similarly. Therefore a new feature should be designed separately for each platform.

I would add that supporting of old versions of Android (2.2) also will make development a little longer.

Hope this helps.

Thanks,
Dmitry