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Comment by pram | Hacker News Reader

"The platforms thriving right now are all built on open source software. More and more teams are building apps in React Native rather than Swift"

Isn't Swift literally open source software lol

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No self respecting iOS developer would pick React Native over SwiftUI.

Why would a company hire iOS developers when they can build everything for all platforms in a single language and framework? It's fungible, interchangeable, easy to maintain, and easy to hire for.

Apple is being boneheaded by going their own way. But closed systems lorded over by tyrannical giants typically are.

Using RN doesn’t preclude need for native devs except for the most basic things like local restaurant wrapper apps. As scale increases (codebase complexity, app feature set, number of users, etc), the more you’ll need someone who understands and can work with all the native bits that leaky abstractions like RN wrap.

Because the single language and framework makes worse apps

Only because Apple made a non-open platform.

React Native makes worse apps for Android too

Maybe Apple and Google should open up their devices and agree on a standard UI toolkit.

Maybe all humans should speak 1 language. Maybe there should be no countries. Maybe we all should be the same color and have the same culture. While this may be an interesting idea to discuss over a beer or two, it is so far removed from how the world really works that it's just plain stupid to use it as a argument. Wishful thinking is great and all, but this is never going to happen, and especially with the multiple decades of legacy, disagreements over usability and user experience, non-compatible accessibility systems and API's, the different platforms are very very far from each other.

Now I understand that accessibility is most likely not a high concern for a React dev, but there are people out there who want to give the users of their platform of choice the best possible experience, and that best experience would be delivered with said platforms native tools, because they have the best integration with that platform.

> Maybe all humans should speak 1 language

Your argument is a straw man. When we agree upon standards, wonderful things happen.

HTML, Email, TCP, DNS, and every other protocol are an example of what happens when we collaborate openly and don't have one company lording over everything.

Apple just wants to control the iPhone and the money printer it has built. It has distorted computing for over a decade.

Mobile computing belongs to two companies, not to us.

Desktop OSes are still open platforms and yet we have GTK, Qt, Cocoa, and whatever Windows does these days. You can run a Qt app on macOS, but macOS users are used to Cocoa and prefer the experience of using a native-feeling app. Wouldn’t be any different if you could run Android-native apps on iOS or vice versa.

There does seem to be a bit of cult-like loyalty to every decision Apple makes.

I would agree with your statement. However...

No self respecting developer would pick SwiftUI over React Native.

But that is too generic of a statement to stand by. I just personally have prioritized development time over... uh.. fandom?

I'm a self respecting developer who has been using React in production for almost 10 years now, and SiwftUI is significantly better than RN. I wasn't a huge fan of learning to deal with XCode, but yeah it's not fandom it just actually works better with fewer quirks and downstream perf issues.

Swift, the core language, has a FOSS compiler. SwiftUI is a proprietary UI toolkit library and app framework whose only relation to Swift is that it's written in it. It would be like calling GDK "ValaUI" or Bevy "RustEngine".

Swift has no use beyond writing software to target Apple users.

Apple isn't viewed as friendly to open source since you can't even distribute software to their platform without going through their censorship/taxation centralized review process. (And an army of people will rush to tell you this is okay.)

The meme of Swift being useful to anything but Apple devs needs to die.

Swift is open source, but SwiftUI and UIKit are both closed-source which is what I meant.

I think they mean SwiftUI.

If you noticed inaccuracies in the article you might be interested to know that the article was written by AI.

And for those of you hissing at my previous comment you might be interested to know that this joke was written by AI.

Now you don't know what to do.

Rip Norm Macdonald

I mean I could downvote it

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=thHWvoYfNyo

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