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Comment by joenot443 | Hacker News Reader

I was at Snap during this project’s early days (Screenshop!) and spent a bit of time debugging some stuff directly with Simon. He’s a wonderful engineer and I’m thrilled to see this project out in the open. Congratulations Snap team! Well deserved.

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I'm surprised Snap of all companies invested in a cross-platform UI framework given how simple their app seems in comparison to more complex ones out there.

And more importantly, Snapchat seems like an app which could highly benefit from tight integration with native features (eg. camera, AR features, notifications, screenshot detection, etc.)

Perhaps for the same reason we got Airbnb of all companies to create Lottie. https://lottie.airbnb.tech/#/

These companies have super talented engineers and can afford to invest in skunkworks projects like these when they can’t find any suitable options in the market.

More like "super talented engineers" will keep increasing cost of such projects until they get told this stuff doesn't generate revenue/cost cutting is happening, so work more on ad tech, leave or find external free labor("community") to maintain it.

As far as Im concerned, Snapchat is onw of the most complicated apps thats routinely used by hundreds of millions of people. You yourself listed all the features they have. And every one of them is pixel perfect, with insane amounts of time spent perfecting the user experience of every single ome of those features. In fact, the success of Snap could be attributed to how pixel perfect the app is.

And then you call it simple?

I share your opinion, but I think of the comment above like this. If something thinks your ui "just makes sense" and is dead simple to use, then you know you've perfected it. That is the best compliment you can get.

You kind of just proved my point. If they want attention to detail and good performance then writing native is probably better. The simplicity that I was referring to was the number of views that need to be implemented. A cross platform UI framework would help if there were hundreds of views that needed to be built consistently but for the number of views in Snapchat, I think native implementations would probably be faster and cheaper.

As for the "success of Snap could be attributed to how pixel perfect the app is". I think the success of Snap can be attributed to a lot of things. But if you took a look at how unoptimized the Android experience was in 2017 when it was taking off I don't know how you could call it pixel perfect.

They famously DID NOT have any android app for a while. Contrary to what the Emacs HN keyboard warriors might think, the world actually used predominantly iPhone as the smartphone especially among the kids in the US. Their android experience didnt really matter.

So once again... why focus so much on cross platform? You're glazing Snap a whole lot but not answering my question. I don't deny that they have some incredible engineering, but that's not a reason to invest a lot into a cross platform UI framework rather than just using something off the shelf like React Native or building the app natively to begin with.

"the world actually used predominantly iPhone as the smartphone especially among the kids in the US"

The world or the us?

Snapchat, an app which half-assed picture taking so hard that it did so by simply snapshotting the camera preview, rather than bothering to take an actual photo.

They did this so it would be faster. Obviously they didn't do it for the fun of it.

Definitely one of the cooler projects to watch while I was there. I recall the goal was to open-source it from early on, so I'm glad to see it come to fruition!

Same! I've worked with Simon on this and tried (and failed) to port it to web. Truly a smart guy - and congratulations to the rest of the team!

Would you use this framework for a project today?

“Composer” ;)

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