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Comment by ashishb | Hacker News Reader

There have been several iterations to have a unified way to build Android and iOS apps.

  - using HTML
  - using JavaScript
  - using JS+React
  - using Dart
  - using Kotlin
  - using Swift

This fundamentally does not work for anyone with more than 10M+ installs just like you can't write Mandarin and English in one script.

This only works for devs who over time churn out as their app fails or becomes too big [1]

1 - https://ashishb.net/tech/react-native/

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   > This fundamentally does not work for anyone with more than 10M+ installs just like you can't write Mandarin and English in one script.

Provably false. My bank app (Nubank) is written in Flutter and it's one of the most used banks in Brazil (100mi+ clients who rely on the iPhone or Android app, since it's a digital bank with no web interface).

Good for you.

I meant as a general rule of thumb.

Genuinely curious: What does the number of installs have to do with anything? I didn't see anything about that in the linked post (which is brief, and only about React Native), and can't figure out how popularity of an app connects to which framework is used.

Would be interested to learn how this general rule of thumb works.

You said "fundamentally", not as a rule of thumb :)

Fair point. I should have said broadly.

> This fundamentally does not work for anyone with more than 10M+ installs just like you can't write Mandarin and English in one script.

Well, I did work on a Flutter app with a tiny team between 2018-2021 and we had 15M installs, were app of the day, got featured multiple times in the App Store, got Google’s design award, were a preloaded app on iPhones in Apple Stores in several countries, and were overall doing quite well.

It was a very focused app though, so the size of our codebase didn’t really grow with the number of installs.

In the short-term it can work.

Over time maintenance becomes hard

New iOS and Android features, sometimes backward-incompatible are introduced.

And now, you need your dependencies to implement them. Which might or might not happen. At best, this makes usage inferior. At worst, you can no longer publish an update in app stores.

This app was started in 2017 and it is still running today and making (way more modest than back then) revenue. It’s just that I don’t work on it anymore.

Goodnotes has tens of millions of monthly-active users (not just installs) and uses Swift WASM to run the same Swift code across iOS, Android, Windows, and web.

I mean, this is "fundamentally" wrong. Shopify for example continues to use React Native [0].

[0] https://shopify.engineering/five-years-of-react-native-at-sh...

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