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Comment by amirrajan | Hacker News Reader

Owner/CEO/Steward of RubyMotion here.

1. Laurent did sell RubyMotion off (to basically retire). He sold it to me. The guy that built the mobile adaptation of A Dark Room with RubyMotion (which hit the number one spot on the AppStore _and_ the number two spot on Google Play).

2. Since the acquisition, there have been monthly updates to the platform, and measures to slowly open source RM under a _sustainable_ open source model.

3. I have since released 4 other apps using RubyMotion. Combined they have approximately 3.5 million downloads.

4. RubyMotion is _actually_ native (unlike React Native).

5. RubyMotion is definitely not cool anymore. It's battle-hardened, "just works", fast (faster than Swift in fact), and can leverage all the existing Android and iOS libraries out there (which React not-Native can't do out of the box).

6. Email me and I'll hook you up with an Indie license <3.

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Amir, thanks for following up. Like I said in the article, I've used RubyMotion in production in the past. We were one of the early adopters and launched at least half a dozens apps in it. We payed for all our licenses. I love the product and this was money very well spent. It allowed us to use the same language (Ruby) in a larger portion of the projects. This was particularly important when some of our clients were small startups with an existing Rails app, and it was important for them to keep the same language for the mobile app.

I just think the support for Android should have happened a lot sooner. But of course this is easier said than done.

Moving forward to React Native is part of the same approach. It's important for us to use a technology that delivers fast in multiple channels and has a great chance of still being relevant in the next 10 to 20 years. And for me, these are the strongest points on Javascript.

And you're correct, React Native is not truly native, but it does the job pretty well without major impacts on usability. RubyMotion is truly native and very well designed IMHO.

Best of luck for the future.

I totally understand the need for Android support back then (and to your point should have happened sooner).

With regards to relevancy, RubyMotion is built on top of LLVM. With regards to Ruby the language itself, it's been around for decades and won't be going anywhere (granted the same can be said for JavaScript).

I'm waiting to see how web assembly will shake things up.

Best of luck to you man (I genuinely mean that). And if you ever decide to come back to RM, I'll be here to help :-)

Thanks. Same here. I truly respect the work that has been done on RubyMotion. Like I said in my post, brilliant people there.

When are you going to open source? will RubyMotion ported to Linux?

>When are you going to open source?

- Build, project templates, dynamic bindings generation (BridgeSupport) have all been open sourced.

- The repl is targeted to be open sourced in Q1 2019.

- The parser is targeted to be open sourced in Q2 2019.

- The rest is TBD. But I bought the website domain dragonruby.org :-D

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