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Comment by matchbok | Hacker News Reader

With the right libraries and clean code, going native for iOS/Android is usually the solution. Building UI/networking/etc quickly in Swift/Kotlin just isn't an issue anymore. RN/Flutter won't be used in 5 years.

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Strongly disagree. Both frameworks save on dev time to a very significant degree. I actually foresee better cross platform solutions being introduced in 5 years

I don't agree, and I have worked with this significantly as a consultant and core contributor to react-native. What typically happens is people convince themselves what you are saying is true then there ends up being huge delays to spin up all the infra app side... THEN eventually, they kinda are okay. until the next react-native release.

edit: would like to clarify that of course I would recommend better ways... but... clients do as clients do.

You are looking at this with hindsight bias and are assuming that for some reason the future will remain the same as the past. There are no fundamental reasons why ios and android development occur with two different ui frameworks in two different languages.

With low interest rates companies will not be able to justify paying 3x to maintain 3 different apps when they could theoretically just pay 1x for one app that works everywhere

The key word here is “theoretically”. These cross platform solutions are great in theory - who wouldn’t want to share code across all platforms? It’s a great sell, especially to the folks holding the purse.

The reality though is it doesn’t work well. The tooling, performance, debugging, library stability and observability are all substantially worse. Your team might save a ton of time spinning up a React Native app, but lose it all right back once you keep hitting gnarly Android performance issues.

In the future, once we have a proper cross platform development kit officially supported by Android and Apple, code sharing will be great. But today it doesn’t exist. And that’s why none of (the good) apps you use are written in a cross platform way.

Flutter’s development experience is better than RN’s, and perhaps even better frameworks will come in time.

Hard to leverage JS devs when it's an entirely different language from JS.

Dart really isn't hard to pick up and is surprisingly nice to write code in.

Good metrics for proposal to VCs .. to steel the cake from native platform overlord. Lets eat the apple and google cake to boost our return margins. Bam! VCs alliance for new scene graph renderer for the web on any device.

It’s the other way around. Don’t let native overlords eat into our cake.

For simple apps, maybe. But anything complex still requires native resources and expertise. So the value is greatly diminished.

How would you define a simple app out of curiosity?

> But anything complex still requires native resources and expertise.

Any examples of simple and complex apps?

Ios and android development as they exist today will die once governments mandate then end of the app store monopolies.

There is no Android app store monopoly. You can download apks and install them already. See: https://f-droid.org/

Just as there was no “IE monopoly”, even though you could technically download separate browser.

I don't think that works as a metaphor. IE got MS in trouble because it was so embedded into the OS that it was literally required, and MS did everything they could to force users to use it.

Android works fine when built from source with no Play Store at all, using F-Droid as the primary store.

Ah yes, this mandate will immediately make all APIs across all OSes the same

Have you tried SwiftUI? It’s not replacing RN any time soon

I'm just holding out for a Jetpack Compose for iOS :)

It’s called SwiftUI?

> SwiftUI

Complete separate toolkit with its own patterns and semantics. I’d rather use one then learn two.

https://touchlab.co/compose-ui-for-ios/

Than*

Apple breaks too much stuff in software updates. I want to control what versions of key libraries I'm integrated with and rev them on my own schedule.

It exists:

https://touchlab.co/compose-ui-for-ios/

Apparently Jetpack Compose for iOS has zero accessibility support so far, if the Droidcon NYC app is a representative sample. I'm sure that will come; just don't use it yet for anything more important than the iOS version of an Android conference app.

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