Cross-platform development - Go with a cross-platform UI toolkit or native on multiple platforms?

Question

I\'m looking for some arguments to pitch to my boss and fellow developers.

We\'re currently finishing up the preliminary UI mockups and getting ready to move on to

Answer 1

Actually I think using Qt has become very interesting since it's now LGPL

Answer 2

Every time you add a layer of abstraction, you trade control over the details for more rapid development. You'll be able to get a lot done up-front using some cross-platform framework. On the flip side, when you want to do something that the framework doesn't support—and lets face it: it isn't going to implement all possible things those native APIs can do—you either have to implement it (for all platforms) using the native API, or do some other wierd hackery to get a "good enough" solution. And of course, when things go terribly wrong, having that extra layer of code you don't own makes it harder to debug. There really is something to be said for owning your entire stack as much as possible.