Hacker News Reader

Comment by ckluis | Hacker News Reader

TLDR: Serve XML from a server and get "dynamic" native apps

“Native” in this case refers to the fact that the interface is rendered using the system UI libraries. So you get a native feel for things like scrolling, navigation, gestures, etc. This isn’t possible (or really difficult) using web technologies (HTML and JS)

This is the same B.S. definition-stretching that you see in a bunch of React Native posts.

“Dynamic” “native” apps

I was hoping this would be like Hypercard (without much real hope, of course), allowing users to create their own native 'apps' with perhaps some safety limitations. That would be both dynamic and native, though any scriptable actions would be performant.

So it’s a web app with new syntax.

People who use the term “native app” incorrectly like this should… face difficult circumstances.

It is native though. You misunderstand what this is.

My perspective is that if an app is not directly using a platform’s APIs, it is not native to that platform. Feel free to explain to me and others how this take is wrong and how something written in XML could be a native app on, say, iOS.

It is using the platform's API directly and renders native components. The XML is just an abstraction layer on top of that and not a web wrapper like you're implying. It's not using any WebView.

I’m not saying it’s a WebView, but obviously it works extremely similarly. It is not a native app framework.

It's native by all definitions of it. It calls native APIs, renders native system elements and what you get is indistinguishable from an app written in Swift or Kotlin down to the machine code displaying it.

The "XML is just an abstraction layer" part is exactly what makes it not native. It's a big abstraction layer, it uses React under the hood, it's not native.

It's easy, instead.

It may render native components, but those components are still controlled by the non-native runtime, thus extra baggage.

So you think "it’s a web app with new syntax" is an accurate description? That's what we're discussing.

No, I don't think it's a web app at all.

It would definitely be using native UI components, which a normal web browser won't give you via the rendering engine.

But that's as native as it gets. The control logic for how those components operate outside of how they're internally built is likely done w/ React / JavaScript, instead of native.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com