The 'App economy' is a highly lucrative and competitive market for independent software vendors as it potentially offers an easy highway to reach millions of users. However, the mobile application landscape is scattered and an application developer has to publish the software for several different platforms to be able to serve a majority of smartphone users. Therefore, a bunch of cross-development tools have been offered to simplify this workload. In this paper, we present an evaluation framework for comparing different cross-development tools. We use this framework to evaluate Adobe PhoneGap tool against native development in Android and Windows Phone platforms. The results of a case study reveal that while the cross-platform technique was easy to use, the appearance and usability of the app was mediocre at its best. The business impacts of these are also discussed.