Comment by blizkreeg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by blizkreeg | Hacker News Reader

I 1000th this. Native mobile dev pretty much doesn't make sense for most early stage startups anymore. I sunk in thousands in launching an MVP for my product with the help of an outsourced team, only to run into slow(er) and costlier dev cycles, maintaining 2 code bases, designing for 2 platforms, app store rejections, users not applying the latest updates, Android users recycling apps when they run out of memory, device fragmentation (on Android) issues, and an overall lack of agility in making updates to the app. If you want to iterate fast, fuhgedaboutit. Granted some of the problems I've outlined are not about the path chosen for app development, but you should be aware (and scared) of these if you're looking to build an app.

I've literally taken to replacing some tabs in the app with web views and serving light, responsive HTML5 through them.

Unless your app is a game, or you already have found product/market fit AND have a large eng team and the resources (aka $$$) at your disposal, probably makes no sense to develop native any more. Looking at Airbnb and Instagram ditching native dev too, I'm not even sure of the latter case.

I'm not sure its fair to say that they are "ditching" native dev. React native works well for some flows, but is still lacking when it comes to a lot of more complex animations, non-standard views and basically most things that make you really go "wow." Those companies are using it where appropriate, but large portions of the apps are still native.

Fair enough (pun intended). But for the majority of startups, I'd still wager they don't need those premature 'wow' effects.

I would argue that in some cases (certainly not all), a little bit of strategically placed "wow" may be vital for some startups to grow - small things that make users love a product and show others. The vast majority of users will not sympathize with the reasons a developer would choose to use something like a web view in a native app.

I was going to focus on ReactNative my the more I read about the more I realized I am better off native, at least for now. Exactly because I do a lot of animations and I am all about interaction. If your product looks bad or "dated" it's not going to connect with users, not in the aread I am focusing on. If your product is about that extra pop, then I think Native might be best.

I'm a long term native developer who's been doing react native contacting for the past 6 months. One big issue that you run into is if you need to do long running background tasks (network polling, bluetooth, music, etc) you basically need to write native code to handle it. Complex animations and non standard view's aren't that bad to implement.

Just about to implement react native app with network polling. Do you have any links/tips to share re best practices?

If you are just doing polling when your app is in the foreground, you should not have to write any native code. All of the polling can be handled in your actions.

If you need to poll in the background when the phones screen is locked, then you will need to write native code. Writing native code to do this isn't that hard (react native docs are good), it's just annoying that you will have duplicate business logic for Android/iOS.

This is why technical cofounders that can build a native mobile MVP make sense.

I am technical, it's just that native dev is not my forte. But that's besides the point. It is less about the money, more about the huge overhead of building one.

Looking at Airbnb and Instagram ditching native

Any sources for this? I would like to read up on it.

I think the quoted might be referring to Instagram's use of React Native and Airbnb's hint of exploring it (can't determine what they do). So perhaps this is clarified as native app development for native app (as opposed to a cross-platform framework/shim).

Didn't Instagram just do a big refactor of their iOS app, and release an iOS OSS framework with their new feed code?

https://realm.io/news/tryswift-ryan-nystrom-refactoring-at-s...

I spoke to a few people at Airbnb about this. Supposedly about 10-20% of the app is React native. I really doubt that Instagram have ditched all of their Native code for React native.

The airbnb ios app is awful and getting worse. I am constantly running into inconsistent state issues. No problems on Android so far though.

We don't have much written up about yet, but 90% of our recent Trips functionality was built in RN [1] and there are some bits in this talk as well [2].

1: https://twitter.com/spikebrehm/status/799338174979842050

2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npwa3ZmG9VQ

There is a huge difference between using react-native and ditching native. My observation at Airbnb is we are the former, not the later.

Netflix is running React native across all devices.

Not true. Our Android and iOS apps are native. We are however looking into React Native.

Source - I'm an engineer at Netflix.

Sorry. I was under the impression after watching this video Netflix was using React across all devices. [0]

[0] https://youtu.be/eNC0mRYGWgc?t=23m50s

React is not the same as React Native... there's enough similarities to share a name. React is the base (afaik) for all web-based client interactions, which also includes a lot of TV/Webtop interfaces, but not necessarily Android and iOS.

Given the shift towards Flux and Falcore, React Native may make sense for the iOS/Android, and potentially in Windows/Ubuntu as well (speculating).

Disclaimer, I don't work there, but did go through the interview process last year, I wasn't enthusiastic about moving to California at the time.

No worries! Tracker1 is correct that all browser based UI is built using React. Other platforms may be doing their own explorations into React but I can't speak to that since those are outside of my domain of expertise. I can say that my team loves React so we're definitely looking into React Native.

Are you guys hiring? ;)

Absolutely!

https://jobs.netflix.com/

I can verify that it's an amazing place to work :)

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