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Comment by akmarinov | Hacker News Reader

It does matter, I skip using a lot of airline apps and some bank apps, because of the horrible experience they provide.

It’s easier to do it via their website.

You're equating horrible experience with cross platform architectures, whereas there are any number of reasons apps can be bad.

It is perfectly possible to build a poor app in any language.

Well that’s the point. While it’s perfectly possible to build a poor app in any language, it’s almost impossible to build excellent app in cross-platform framework. The reason why you recognize them almost immediately is that there are some people obvious annoying details - scroll lag, non-standard UI elements, non-standard navigation patterns, you can just immediately feel something is wrong, even if you are a normie. It can be partially compensated by the app having some other great benefits.

I disagree about scroll lag. There are plenty of WebView apps (and websites obviously) that have zero scrolling issues.

Non-standard UI elements is something I don't personally care about. Some people do, but I think this is an issue that is often overstated (or perhaps rather overestimated as a factor) by platform enthusiasts.

What does matter a great deal to me though is launch speed and battery usage. Mobile apps are often used for short periods of time. They must launch instantly. And battery is the scarcest resource in mobile computing.

Nobody will voluntarily use an app that is slow to launch and shows up at the top of the battery usage table in spite of only having been in use for a few minutes.

As a developer, these are the issues I would like to learn more about in respect of any new cross-platform technologies.

> While it’s perfectly possible to build a poor app in any language, it’s almost impossible to build excellent app in cross-platform framework.

100% this. Cross platform frameworks will always fall into a weird uncanny valley where there are just things that are subtly off about apps made with them. Most of the user base may not be able to pinpoint exactly what's wrong with such apps, but I believe they still notice on some level.

I rarely notice unless the developer hasn't put any effort into the UI. Most people don't care.

Of course they don't care. But you can feel the experience is not spotless.

I usually don't notice or care, unless they haven't put any effort into it. Now that I'm thinking about it, there are a few that I suspect aren't native, and I don't get bad feelings from the apps unless they are badly programmed and the functionality doesn't work.

But if they don't care, why does it matter what they feel?

What I mean is they don't actively consciously care. They have better things to do. But they're not immune to perception. They do have some impression and experience that they're also likely to be able to express in the form of feelings.

Even the best Flutter apps feel awful compared to a decent native iOS app. Which honestly sucks, because I much prefer writing Flutter apps to anything else.

Unfortunately the horrible experience is much more normalized with the amount of bloatware and horrible ux software out there to the point that users will use it either way in many cases.

And truth is, as long as you have exclusive content on a service, the quality of your app (and thus the satisfaction of your end users) doesn't matter all that much.

This comment applies equally to native as it does cross-platform frameworks

And yet those businesses continue with the app they have. That tells that the vast vast majority of their clients don't care or are happy with them.

I'm not sure why you're getting downvoted. I often don't notice, and I've never heard anyone comment about those things. Most end users don't even know what those platforms are. Some apps look different than others just like some websites look different than others.

Or just suffer through.

That’s not how cause and effect work.

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