Ask HN: What would you use today for a greenfield mobile app?

8 points·tdfx··5 comments

If you're bootstrapping a new app, what would you use for developing the mobile app and the backend? Is React Native still the best shortcut for a cross platform code base? What backend is easiest to handle a login and some CRUD operations?

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I faced this choice recently and opted for React Native, without Expo or anything higher level.

In retrospect, it was a perfect choice. Knowing React, there was literally no learning curve, the apps feel very snappy (most mobile apps suck in this respect, and I suspect the use of higher-level frameworks is the reason), and React in general is unexpectedly pleasurable to work with.

I always use PHP/Laravel for the back-end - since I know it well - it provides the login/CRUD stuff out of the box, but honestly, for a typical CRUD app is matters very little which back-end you use, as long as you keep it nice and clean (and write it yourself rather than use something like Firebase which, again, sucks).

Depends on the type of app. React Native might be better for something resource heavy like a video app (we use it at Cameo for mobile, and regular react for web), but if it is something like a todo list or email app, a wrapped webview would let you use the same codebase for web and mobile. For a backend, I'm partial to nodejs, it's nice having Javascript on both the frontend and backend. Something like Express or Restify is good for quickly setting up CRUD apps

Imho Flutter creates much better apps with a better developer experience.

Have they fixed the iOS jank yet? I was looking into this a few months ago, but at the time the demos coming out for iOS were appalling, so I dropped it.

Xcode and Android Studio

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