AI in Customer Support, Ecommerce, and Leadership
For years, my default advice was “go hybrid first”.
When a founder had 50k, a deadline, and no mobile team, Cordova was a rational way to ship something that looked like an app.
Cross-platform let you learn, get distribution, and avoid doubling the build for Apple and Google.
That advice flips in 2026.
AI removed a big part of the old cost argument: scaffolding, repetitive UI, API wiring, even a lot of debugging. The expensive part moved to the edges: performance hiccups, offline behavior, camera and push quirks, payments, privacy prompts, and the weird crashes that only happen on one Android device.
Hybrid is still a great choice when you are basically shipping a web workflow in a wrapper, or when Shopify-style speed matters more than deep platform behavior.
But if your app is how customers judge trust, reliability, or polish, the “one codebase” savings often turns into a permanent tax.
I have watched teams ship the first version sooner, then spend the next two quarters explaining the same issues to customers and support.