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Comment by darshan | Hacker News Reader

I just launched (like, an hour ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20700196) a cross-platform app that is almost all shared code. In my case, the solution is a web app with very lightweight native wrappers, and I'm quite happy with it. Obviously that wouldn't be the perfect fit for all apps, but none of Dropbox's "(not so) hidden costs" are relevant in my case, and I suspect many apps would be a good fit for the architecture I went with.

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Most cross-platform solutions are great in the beginning and then the problems start to come to surface as teams grow, requirements change, bugs are harder to track down, code needs to be updated, the next hot cross-platform framework comes along with new promises, etc.

You seem to be describing problems with all software that has to grow.

Sure but, these issues come to surface much quicker.

Every time I've started a new iOS project in the past ~2 years, I've reached out to a handful of developers and managers on how cross-platform is going for them. None have been completely sold on it. The ones that are, are the ones that have been doing it for a few months. I've come back around to talk to them months later and they aren't so confident in the decision anymore.

So you didn't launch an app at all; you launched a web page and submitted a single-site web browser to both app stores.

Nope, that's not accurate at all. The native apps support push notifications, in-app payments, native UI elements, proper lifecycle management (storing in-progress doodles across the app being killed in the background, or the device being restarted, for example), and more offline support than would be possible with the website. Among other things.

The things that are in the native wrappers are things that would be iOS-specific or Android-specific regardless of zero shared code or maximum shared code. In my case, the bulk of the app is shared -- everything that can be a common code base is a common code base.

According to GitHub's rough metrics, that's: Go 44.7% Dart 32.8% Java 7.1% JavaScript 6.9% Swift 6.6%

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