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Comment by robenkleene | Hacker News Reader

> According to Evan Bacon, one of the developers leading the Expo project, 40 of the top 100 iOS apps are now non-native. And with the proliferation of AI app builders, the future is starting to look even more non-native.

The linked tweet (https://x.com/Baconbrix/status/1888633966938276267) is only about shopping apps.

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I think there is an implicit assumption that the top 40 apps is reflective of what all app developers should be doing. The top 40 apps are probably also all made my mega corps with enormous budgets and desires to be multi-platform right out of the gate, and also have already vetted necessary issues like "does app performance matter" versus "does developer productivity and app-parity across platforms" matter. Just because a top 40 app is high, maybe it's something like Amazon's shopping app, maybe the trade-offs are heavily towards slow-starting but very feature rich and also equivalent across platforms is necessary. If someone writes a note-taking app that takes 10 seconds to start because it's loading some JavaScript updates and spinning up the non-native code execution hamsters, I already forgot my note. Native is obviously desirable. Or a game is interesting because maybe people are patient for a slow load, but still desire very fast native performance. My main point is there are quite a few trade-offs, and it's unsurprising the leads at Expo are saying look how awesome this stack is. I've used Expo and it was awesome, but it comes with costs too.

Why does Apple allow Expo apps on the App Store when they effectively bypass App Review? Doesn't this go against their own policies?

I say that as someone who uses Expo precisely for this reason.

It's definitely a very gray area within Apple's policy. Shorebird (Flutter OTA updates) describes it best in their FAQ (https://docs.shorebird.dev/faq/#does-shorebird-comply-with-a...).

It seems to be as long as you don't significantly alter the primary purpose of the app, then it's "allowed". But that's a very broad interpretation and puts native Swift apps at a huge disadvantage.

From a strictly UX perspective, I'm strongly of the opinion that most shopping apps also suck industrial quantities of ass.

Like I use them, I can't not and it beats ordering stuff over the phone or whatever. But most of them at best can rise to the dizzying heights of "tolerable."

https://Appgoblin.info/companies/types/development-tools

You can see a ranking of the top non-native apps here.

Good catch, totally missed that, will update

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