Switchboard is not a replacement for OS Tools and frameworks. Rather, Switchboard works with OS tools and APIs, simplifying how you interact with them. Switchboard provides intuitive wrappers to some of the OS specific APIs, making it easy to build a cross platform code base while also making it easier manage audio operations, which can be particularly challenging, especially on Android.

Chances are if you’re trying to build advanced audio features into your application, you will become limited by using the high level tools alone.

Some issues and limitations you are likely to face include:

• Not being able to integrate third party libraries without writing glue code between their library and your audio graph. And you will need to write this for each operating system you support. Probably in C++.

• Using higher level audio nodes will degrade performance (e.g. consume too much memory and CPU).

• You will lose flexibility since OS-frameworks are rigid. This will limit what’s even possible from a UX perspective. The more features you have, the more you will face these limitations.

• Some of these limitations might manifest as bugs. For example you’ll background the app and your audio system will crash. Or you may run into a lot of pops, glitches, and other “unexpected” behaviors (we’ve come to expect it in projects without Switchboard or a custom audio engine in C++ that was put together over a year or more of development).