Nothing says “I don’t give a crap about our users or the user experience” like building a web app or using a cross-platform toolkit. It telegraphs you mainly care about doing it as cheap as you can instead of just building a good app.
The only way to build a decent mobile UX is by making an actual native app.
My experience with XP tools is that if you build anything but the most trivial of apps you keep running into issues where you have to do platform specific workarounds. Eventually it becomes an unmaintainable mess of exceptions and workarounds.
In the long run it’s faster and easier to just build a native app for each platform. That way you can provide the native UX a user of each platform expects without compromise.
> just
?
> The only way to build a decent mobile UX is by making an actual native app.
And that’s the problem.
But React Native is an actual native app. It is entirely compiled down to native code for your respective platform. I agree that the "hybrid" approaches of days gone by (Ionic, Cordova, Phonegap, et. al) were a terrible mess. But there is fundamentally no reason why RN cannot be equally performant to Swift/Kotlin based apps.
Has this changed recently? It’s been my understanding that react native has corresponding native components for many UI elements and uses them. But your react logic is still executing as JavaScript.
Yes, but this is no different than how native works. On iOS, The JS Bridge compiles to bytecode and talks to the Obj-C runtime for native needs like Cocoa, just as Swift does.
Sure you could get better performance by writing your apps directly in Obj-C, but I don't think many people want to go back to those days.
Some definitions:
- The Obj-C runtime is just a shared library that Swift links to on compilation (/usr/lib/libobjc.A.dylib). The performance to call into it is identical for Swift and Obj-C.
- "Sure you could get better performance by writing your apps directly in Obj-C..." Swift code is native code. Cost to access the runtime is identical.
- There is one "hop" to go from Swift to the Obj-C runtime.
- There are >2 "hops" to go through the JS Bridge. https://hackernoon.com/understanding-react-native-bridge-con...
HN is better without personal attacks and insults.
It could be extended to pretty much anything: "I'm insulting your clothes, not you".
Calling something that a person says, or writes "asinine" is inflammatory. If I were to call your defense of it "naive, brain dead and utterly absurd" are you sure you wouldn't interpret that as a personal attack?
Yes, inflammatory. But personal, no.
> If I were to call your defense of it "naive, brain dead and utterly absurd" are you sure you wouldn't interpret that as a personal attack?
Correct, because it's not personal. That would be attacking the quality of the argument, not me, although it would certainly be inflammatory. I certainly wouldn't take it well — but for a totally different reason than you originally specified.
"Personal" and "inflammatory" are two different things.
Web won’t beat native on mobile phones, I’m sorry this argument has been had every single year it’s just absurd we keep arguing about it.
RN is implemented due to developer productivity at the cost of user experience. Which is fine more power to you, but understand that it doesn’t imply better UX.
The barriers to creating apps is also getting smaller (SwiftUI & Jetpack Compose).
Source: Multiple years working on Core Apple systems at Apple and also multiple years at Google
Honestly, it won't beat anything anywhere, but people do keep on trying to make it work.
RN doesn't "compile" the Javascript to bytecode or machine code. Instead, the closest competition you could get from RN is a JIT. But AFAIK iOS doesn't allow a Javascript JIT to run, so the JavaScript running is not being JITed to Bytecode.
Even if you assume that iOS allows a JS JIT now, you still have a JavaScript->Native bridge to cross. This adds a performance hit that Objective-C does not have.
What a better world we'd have if Apple and Google agreed upon a common UI toolkit baseline.
I'd rather a small, scrappy company spend their limited resources on solving their core competency and value prop than fitting to these two stupid and needlessly different platforms.
Web should have won. It still has a good chance. We should have a "native web" in the future: WASM, hardware renderer access, device control, and more. That'll be the target to develop for.
Building for Apple and Android is a total waste of annual human cognitive resources. I hope every company starts doing cross-platform.
the web has won for a lot, but the companies that want to own their ecosystem, and have learnt from their past mistakes. Mobile is a fresh start, and they specifically made it so that web is a 2nd class citizen.
The fact that platform owners such as apple (or indeed any of them, not just singling out apple) did not make it first class is evidence that they prefer to own the platform rather than operate an open platform.
Microsoft, with windows, did not understand this at the time when they had huge advantage with win32, and thus did not lock down the windows platform. You see them trying now, with windows app stores (which i'm glad is not succeeding).
apple has more foresight, and decided to lockdown their app ecosystem. They deliberately removed flash as a form of application delivery, because they know that it can be good (if only adobe could pull their shit together).
The fact that the web still can remain, and that people still use it, is testament that even for a system being hindered, it provides enough value. Unfortunately, it just cannot complete against platform owners who would preferentially make their own native platforms better than web.
I remember this well, as I was already developing with Cocoa on Mac OS X and was pretty disappointed in the beginning when there was no SDK for iOS.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IOS_SDK#History
https://9to5mac.com/2011/10/21/jobs-original-vision-for-the-...
> The App Store came later and apparently as a reaction to jailbreakers and developer backlash.
Which doesn’t have any source.
> because web apps sucked so much
Where did you get this?
However I think while web apps can be „good enough“ [1] for many business applications (i.e. basically data entry and reporting), they weren’t good enough for what consumers wanted.
[1] I mean people still accept suffering from stuff like SAP
At the same time, Palm decided to redo their own OS and they went all-in on the web stack. They even called it WebOS. Palm were a well known name with momentum and talented staff, but WebOS was a failure partly due to poor performance.
That is definitely not why they removed it. All the reasons Jobs listed against Flash were 100% true and a year later Android followed suit.
You’re talking about UI part, which hasn’t been a problem on mobile for a good 10 years.
And what is the core competency?
- yet another syncing backend in 2023?
- figuring out another encryption?
- writing yet another web app in the guise of a mobile app?
- writing a notes app that locks the content and doesn’t even let you have raw files on your computer in easily readable format?
This is just absurd reasoning.
If you care about UX, you should make native apps.
They're trying to make a useful app for humans, not trying to win the HackerNews Award for Excellence in UX. If accepting a little unfixable edge case jank makes their goal way easier to attain, they're going to end up with a much better app overall
This problem has been solved many times over the last decade or so. So claiming that _this_ is the future and not the more established (and smooth!) solution has to be supported by at least some evidence.
We should however be clear about our trade offs and not pretend that web apps can replace native apps.
We don’t need to pretend. Web apps must and already did replace a whole class of apps that never should’ve been native to start with.
For example: why would you even need native app for HN?
I could imagine a nice native app for Hacker News, too
Don't get me wrong, wikipedia website is also brilliant: fast and reaponsive. The app is simply adjusted to the platform it's on, including all the mobile interactions you've come to expect. For example, there's no hover on mobile. In the app I can tap-hold a link and see the preview that you see on hover on Wikipedia's site.
I’d hate to use a web app for maps, notes, document writing, IDE, messaging, etc. I always prefer a good native app to a good website.