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Comment by tekkk | Hacker News Reader

Been using Dart & Flutter. Kinda leaning towards using plain old HTML & CSS inside a webview instead of learning how to work with mobile-specific widgets. Neither won't beat pure-native but at least I'd be able to make a half-decent app fast with HTML & CSS. Tauri looks enticing from that perspective but idk how polished it is vs Flutter.

Oh I'm already using Rust in backend so that wouldn't be a big deal. Wonder how well you're able to do GPU / graphics stuff inside webview though? Is WebGPU supported?

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I’d take a look at Capacitor. I’m biased because I created it but I think it’s fair to say it’s the leading platform for web tech on mobile at the moment.

I haven't checked it thoroughly but would be grateful if you can share. Can you create a single app for mobile, desktop and web in capacitor?

Here's the site: https://capacitorjs.com/

And yes, Capacitor apps can target all of those platforms from a single codebase. If you ever need help or have questions feel free to reach out to me on twitter (link in bio)!

Thanks for your kind offer :)

You might want to consider React Native. That way you get native widgets but CSS-style layout so there's not too much to learn.

Tamagui also really makes targeting web or native really enjoyable.

Disclaimer: He built Tamagui.

I enjoyed your episode on React Native Radio!

I'd look up some Capacitor apps and see if the UI performance with webview is good enough for you. From my experience it's not great on Android, but good on iOS. Meanwhile Flutter is the other way around, and given that iOS is a more important target...this might not be a terrible route to go.

I can't imagine it'll be quicker than Flutter development if you 1) don't have strict design requirements, 2) you're pretty much only targeting mobile, 3) you want something that looks good out of the box.

If you already have a webapp and mobile performance is acceptable, I'd consider just doing Capacitor and migrating to Tauri when the mobile ecosystem is in a good place.

Edit: Oh the ionic CEO already recommended it lol

> From my experience it's not great on Android, but good on iOS.

Huh, that always used to be case (back when the iPhone 4 was the latest model). I'm amazed Android devices haven't solved this yet given that even slow android devices must have faster CPUs than an iPhone 4. Perhaps it's a software issue rather than a hardware one...

https://github.com/ionic-team/capacitor/discussions/3899#dis...

Apparently it's an issue with Android's webview interaction with accessibility settings.

https://engineering.fb.com/2022/09/30/android/launching-a-ne...

Facebook ships their own webview implementation to solve a couple other webview issues, but that's not really a viable solution for everyone else

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