I'm curious about this ... how much more is "under the hood" of a RubyMotion app than an ObjC app? In the HTML5 -> Native tools you're dealing with an extra abstraction, Javascript running on top of an interpreter that talks to native APIs, which becomes a problem if you need to use the native APIs in a way the interpreter designers didn't think of. But RubyMotion isn't a layer on top of native code, it is native code -- it's a Ruby->machine code compiler. So is there any more standing between you and the hardware than there is if you use XCode? Maybe I'm totally misunderstanding the architecture ...