Shoutem – A platform to build, publish, and manage React Native apps | Hacker News Reader

Shoutem – A platform to build, publish, and manage React Native apps

shoutem.github.io

114 pointsanatolinicolae36 comments

Just my two cents: I'm currently building an app on the Shoutem platform, and have been required to extend one of the Shoutem extensions to do so. I have been in direct communication with the Shoutem team throughout this proces, and have gotten to know the platform intimately.

A month into it, I can honestly say I can't recommend using the platform (yet). While the idea is an interesting one, it's bloated, buggy, slow, and doesn't offer much over optimizing a website for mobile devices. That said, the team behind the platform is great, and I'm confident they'll work out the kinks over the coming months to make it more user/developer friendly.

> it's bloated, buggy, slow

But they said "Shoutem apps are slick and fast", how could this be???

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

It’s weird that the app they decided to showcase [1] using their product - has one stars as majority of ratings with a main reason of it crashing all the time. If that’s the best what they could have shown, I wonder how bad it can get then

[1] - https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/brides-wedding-genius-5-1/id...

To be honest, I had some issues on a fresh app with only shoutem-ui which seems to fail in some parts on latest React + RN.

https://github.com/shoutem/ui/issues/327 https://github.com/shoutem/ui/issues/328

All those comments seem to be 4-6 years old

I've used Shoutem's standalone UI library[1] for my last project but haven't used their platform as a whole. During that time, I found it painful to get it working.

Their documentation[2] wasn't great. It was out of date (missing component attributes, icons etc.) and lacked good examples. Often I would have to dig into the source to figure out obscure errors. When I first starting using @shoutem/ui, I couldn't use the latest version of React Native because they locked themselves into an experimental feature[3] which even until now, seems like it hasn't properly resolved.

Again. I can't comment on their platform but I didn't have a good time using their UI library. Had I known this, I would have just gone with NativeBase[4].

[1] - https://github.com/shoutem/ui

[2] - https://shoutem.github.io/docs/ui-toolkit/components/typogra...

[3] - https://github.com/shoutem/ui/issues/241

[4] - https://nativebase.io/

In case you’re curious about React Native in general, I wrote about my positive experience with it when shipping a cross-platform (encrypted) notes app: https://listed.standardnotes.org/@mo/235/i-ve-seen-heaven-an...

Looks good.

Currently I'm using Expo, which is rather nice, but I have to detach rather often, because of stuff like PDF annotations or binary file storage.

How does Shoutem compare to Expo?

Expo is used to run/preview a React Native app where Shoutem is both a CMS that you can use to manage your app's data and a UI library that you can use to build your app.

Ah, so a bit like Firebase+Bootstrap? Or Meteor?

Yeah, kind of a Firebase + Bootstrap which are respectively Shoutem CMS and Shoutem UI.

While I like react and react native, i still think requireing to run a JS interpreter in order to run a native "like" app is still not good engineering practice. I'm betting on multi-platform-projects (MPP) with Kotlin and Kotlin-Native. Engineering wise much more sound, however the iOS and Android platform should have some more support for Reactive like UI's. Without needing JavaScript.

Flutter is a reactive framework that uses Dart, not JavaScript, if that's more to your liking.

Pardon my ignorance, but isn't Flutter a little immature too? I remember playing with it and Dart a while ago, still didn't seem to have everything necessary to ship something to production.

With that said, I think Dart isn't really a language popular enough to replace JS in big projects right now.

Looks very interesting, however you risk being rejected on the Apple app store because of this guideline:

“4.2.2 Other than catalogs, apps shouldn’t primarily be marketing materials, advertisements, web clippings, content aggregators, or a collection of links”.

how so?

Because this doesn't differ from a mobile web browsing experience - content aggregated from the Web.

$149 / month is a bit too high for most apps.

If I were a developer making loads of apps for clients, then maybe. But then reseller might be the way to go? https://new.shoutem.com/pricing/agency/

There are other options. It took me a bit of clicking around to find the pricing information: https://new.shoutem.com/pricing/

Those are options with less functionality, it's not a tiered price, so you'll have to be sure your app will be a financial succes before you start developing.

Stick with building the app yourself only relying on their UI component collection which is free.

I'm not sure why I should have myself forced into another framework, when I could have just imported those components if I wanted them. Also, aren't many such components not available as open source already?

It's not a framework, the UI library has React Native components that help you build your app. You can use their Builder to integrate the CMS, but that's another thing.

We tried working with it and this isn't really a thing - the support is non-existent, the documentation is lacking.

When contacted, they admitted that the only apps published using the Shoutem platform are ones that the company custom-built for some clients (their services are $10k+ a pop).

It sounds like this is just a marketing ploy and a way to get around Apple's new rules about app-builders.

Seems good. Is it free or how? If its not free can you add pricing page properly visible?

And also can you fix "40+ full-featured extensions" section css/jquery on hover its moving in speed I am unable to check all list.

The UI component collection is free, their CMS is paid. https://new.shoutem.com/pricing/

Looks like pricing/more detailed info is on their main (non-Github) website: https://new.shoutem.com/

Looks pretty great, are there any demo apps available to play with?

Has anyone used Shoutem and Appery? I am on a grandfathered plan of the latter but Shoutem looks quite interesting.

This is a great team. Hats off for this release and I can’t wait to play with it.

how does the component library compare to nativebase?

this is their UI kit: https://github.com/shoutem/ui

most of the extensions in their platform are open source: https://github.com/shoutem/extensions

the UI is BSD.

The extension is a bit different: https://github.com/shoutem/extensions/blob/master/LICENSE

Folks at Shoutem poured years of effort into building this platform and it definately shows. The product is really solid and I recommend taking a better look at it if you're planning to build a mobile app.

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