Ask HN: Current state of cross-plattform native app developement | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Current state of cross-plattform native app developement

11 pointsKabuseCha7 comments

Hello HN,

I am currently leading a small team that is about to develop our first app, and we are checking out the landscape regarding frameworks. We would like to be present at on the web, Android, and iOS.

However, the choice of paths is quite overwhelming - to me, app development is in an even more fractured state then web development.

People are advocating PWAs, apps that use webview and native apps - purely based on "fanboyism."

As we have the "react-license-situation" right now I have already stumbled about a bunch of useful recommendations on HN - but all good posts are buried beneath the license specific stuff.

So I would like to gather the thoughts of HN-users in this thread.

In what direction is native app development heading? What tools/frameworks are currently state of the art? If you would develop a new app as a small team, to which platform would you use?

Something like

- basic progressive web app, - ionic, - flutter, - react native, - native script or - weex?

Or anything else?

Resist the urge to be "pure", "perfect", and thus arrive at "beautiful" code. Instead code, ship, & sell. Be free from the burden of "best" practices. Then, when you can afford the inside coffee bar, by all means tell the rest of us what a beautiful framework you're "now" using.

So, start with what you know. Make something amazing to use even with the inefficient and uncool tools of the trade.

I'd recommend starting with what you know best. PWA/Webview is a decent place to start for many as it's a quick learning curve.

If the application takes off, usually you'll drop the cross-platform approach and re-write in the native variants - IMHO obviously. In that lens you're better off iterating quickly and then diving into specific native builds. I'm sure there are many that will disagree.

If you know React really well, then React Native might make more sense. Weex is good if you're coming from Vue, but the technology is still relatively new (and documentation is light).

I created an app in ionic, and I find it good for pretty simple app workflows (standard tabs, traversal, etc). You can check out the app here (download links in the middle of the page).

sdabulletin.com

If you have any questions about the dev experience, or otherwise, feel free to let me know.

Since its a small team and its your first app just a PWA is gonna take you a long way while trying to understand product market fit and simply to see if users like your product. Case in point checkout out Missive email app, everything is html/css (no frameworks) and it performs really well on all platforms (sometimes even better than react native), i think they're a 2 person team

Check out https://reactiveui.net/about

To be used with Xamarin.

Since you mentioned Flutter, there is a new article about it -- https://goo.gl/4BaSPx

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