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Comment by yesimahuman | Hacker News Reader

This looks very interesting. I still question whether teams need this or React Native when they could just bring their existing React web app to mobile with Capacitor. The benefit to that approach is being able to use React web frameworks like Next or Tailwind, without having to use a system specifically designed for native mobile or React Native. Regardless, different solutions work for different teams and this looks like a very interesting project that I need to spend some time with.

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It might be good to explicitly disclose in your post that you are affiliated with Capacitor/Ionic.

Didn't know Capacitor! Very cool.

This is still such a problem - as a small startup we still have two completely separate code bases that we need to maintain with a tiny team (though we share Redux and Tailwind thanks to https://www.npmjs.com/package/twrnc). If we could "flutterize" our apps and make them run everywhere like this lib allows us to that'd save a huge amount of time.

Wrote an essay about our current solution here: https://nikodunk.com/2022-05-10-the-tech-stack-for-maximum-e...

Ionic uses capacitor by default, you might know that one.

I've never done mobile, but I'm learning so much here. Thank you everyone!

We need to launch a mobile app because someone started impersonating our web app and abusing our API. Their Google Play app has 100k+ installs, and it's rapidly growing. They're giving us a bad name too by injecting ads and degrading performance.

We have a React/TypeScript app (in a monorepo if that matters) and need to launch something on Android to get rid of these copycats.

Us: https://FakeYou.com

Not us: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.headbreyz....

(NB: I'd love to contract or hire someone to do this, in case anyone on HN is interested.)

Capacitor uses WebView which is less performant than RN

I do not think it’s that straightforward actually. WebViews are JIT compiled which leads to big performance gains. React Native only can use a JIT with Hermes and Hermes is just plain worse than something like V8 with JIT enabled.

I don’t think RN can use a JIT at all on iOS. Only WKWebView processes can due to Apple’s security model. This makes Capacitor JS significantly faster for certain workloads

You should try to communicate more forthcomingly that CapacitorJS bundles the webapp with the native binaries, which means that you get better startup performance, but at the cost of not being able to serve the webapp fresh from the web (instead having to go through app store review process on every update like with native apps).

I wouldn't let its native support pigeonhole it as a React Native-only library.

In my experience, it rivals other web-only libraries, especially with the compiler.

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