Hacker News Reader

Comment by Gaishan | Hacker News Reader

Android's coming. Join the waitlist; https://www.verbz.ai/android-vip

"Coming" could mean anything from pending a Play Store approval to a vague plan to hire a team once you get traction. I noticed LinkedIn page shows you have four iOS developers and zero Android.

I don't mean to pick on Verbz. I'm just upset that after 30ish years of consumer apps everything is still so fragmented. Launching an app that reaches most users shouldn't be such a difficult task.

It’s a huge ask. You literally need to hire other people full time to duplicate work rather than iterate on your core offering.

If you can hit your stride with iOS then it should be easy to go to android provided enough resources. However, your core offering to me doesn’t make much sense. Duplicating that on android doesn’t seem like a good value add.

It shouldn't be a huge ask because the tooling should make it easy. We had Java ME, Flash, and the first web apps 20 years ago. Since then we've only regressed. It's somehow easier for people to use platform specific frameworks even for apps that should be generic.

Beta user here. We use this at the management level. One of our core mgmt team has Android. They get the emails in the meantime. The benefit has outweighed any inconvenience - obviously any new product comes in stages - and we've used this as a force function to better understand how and why we work the way we do. HN more than anybody should get that tech takes time to developer even in parallel, but it's always entertaining to see people go off all the same. Our one Android user is cheering you on. Every nudge helps :P

This is an age old argument. However, the evidence is in favor of platform specific. Most big companies that have built big products using cross platform toolkits (e.g. Facebook) usually end up reversing this decision and building with native APIs in the end. You get better integration, which often has performance, debugging, UI, and feature importance that ends up winning out.

Looking at their app I don't see it as a generic thing at all. They're aiming for consumer-oriented UX... unless you're doing something 100% custom and wild, then you will look out of place on your respective platform using generic toolkits.... or you'll typically have to re-invent the wheel for each platform in some non-native toolkit.

They're also on iOS first. IMHO, UIKit (and soon SwiftUI) is the best mobile development toolkit out there, including generic solutions.

Literally none of that stuff needs a platform specific framework and toolchain. I'm not arguing that F web views, Flutter or React Native would have been better. I'm arguing that the fact that there isn't a good cross platform solution is evidence the ecosystem is messed up.

FWIW the Facebook example is not necessarily generalisable. The original Facebook app was a thin wrapper around the existing mobile web site. It was a leaky and poorly designed abstraction that was fundamentally flawed.

Facebook used react native for a while, which isn’t a web view wrapper, and then went away from that towards native: https://engineering.fb.com/2020/03/02/data-infrastructure/me...

So far the only actual success I’ve seen is electron on the desktop, and in that world everyone complains how apps use huge amounts of RAM.

There’s only one true success for a generic solution across all platforms: the web. Because it doesn’t pretend to integrate natively, nor depend on native APIs. But with it will always come limitations that cannot be avoided.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com