Whether you’re a CMO with business-focused teams reporting to you, or a technical manager or CIO with technical teams reporting to you—and you’re deciding which platforms to support for your internally-facing enterprise apps or externally-facing consumer apps—ask your teams this:

Why does Apple’s simulator only give you 5 device options (really just 3 distinct form factors), while Android’s emulator gives you over 20—and that’s just the popular ones?

Then ask your team this:

• BAs: How does this affect the use cases and business drivers?
• UX Designer: how does this affect the user interaction model?
• Graphics Designer: how do the screen sizes and various DPIs affect graphics elements?
• Developer: how does the differing amount of RAM and OS versions affect architecture, design, and implementation?
• QA Engineer: how do all these devices affect the amount of testing that will need to be done?

Then ask the entire team:

1. How does this affect the timeline?
2. How does this affect cost?

Don’t ask for an answer right away. Give them a day to think about it.

Then ask yourself: when you’re tantalized by low-cost devices, how does developing for them affect the total cost of ownership?

And have a great day.