Cross-platform technology (such as hybrid apps using WebView, Flutter, React Native, etc) have been rapidly gaining traction among tech companies that have a strong presence on both web and mobile platforms. While newer companies can readily adopt these technologies, for established tech companies, like Agoda, with complex systems and extensive legacy codebases, this transition is a monumental task. This article aims to highlight the problems that cross-platform technologies solve and highlights Agoda’s journey towards adopting them.
What is Cross-Platform Technology?
Cross-platform technology allows a single codebase to be deployed across multiple platforms, making it a transformative approach for modern development. By enabling over-the-air (OTA) updates, businesses can ensure that all users have access to the latest features without requiring manual app updates. This saves time, reduces costs, and enhances the user experience.
Agoda’s Approach to Cross-Platform Technologies
Our journey with WebViews began in 2012, initially focusing on post-booking processes. With technological advancements, we expanded their use to the more conversion-sensitive pre-booking funnels i.e checkout. This strategic shift aimed to not only reduce cost of development and maintenance but also to increase the time to market for new features.
During this transition, we faced several challenges, including ensuring price, availability and feature consistency across platforms. To minimize conversion loss, we also revamped our Mobile Web UI and UX, drawing priors from our app experiments.
The results thus far have been remarkable! WebView migration significantly boosted our development speed and efficiency, almost 3x. Despite initial concerns, WebView’s slower loading times did not notably impact conversion rates. In fact, fixing some bugs on native that were found during the migration led to incremental conversion with WebView over Native.
Before migrating additional parts of the funnel, we evaluated React Native, Flutter, and Ionic by building MVPs to test the riskiest assumptions in the shortest possible time. Based on our learnings, our teams have already begun migrating another part of the pre-booking funnel using cross-platform technologies, with much more to come!
You can also read the full article by Devesh Lakhotia, Principal Product Manager at Agoda, detailing our exciting journey!
Join us on this journey and become part of the dynamic team driving Agoda’s technological evolution! Interested? Apply below
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