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Comment by yoz-y | Hacker News Reader

I am honestly _astonished_ that the current crop of agents are not all written natively for every platform.

I tried porting a moderately complex workout app that I’ve built over years (and which includes a whole agentic loop) from web to iOS native. It took me a couple of evenings.

There is now no excuse to not offer a native experience for every supported platform when you are a bigger company.

Make one of the platforms using good coding practices. Vibe code the others from the source using a proper test battery.

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Because it’s too complex and not worth the effort. Most users will not care about or perceive the benefit. If they delegate that responsibility to Google via Electron, they can focus on features/bug fixes that move the needle.

This isnt how a company which has "solved programming" would act.

Especially since users do prefer a native experience and having their RAM conserved.

This is exactly how a company would act when they notice millions of people downloading and using their ram-hungry electron app. There is just no reason to not act this way.

Also the part people forget is the significant coordination cost of having multiple teams work on multiple native codebases.

I hate Electron apps with a passion, but I can understand why the AI companies are using it.

What effort ? I’ve started seeing this attitude more and more. We had a thing that took a week to do before. Now it takes a morning. So we refuse to spend half a day polishing it because it’s too annoying.

Once the initial port is done, keeping platforms in sync is fast. Not to mention that a harness that would automate this would be valuable.

I run codex on an old rpi, it eats 190M of ram for what essentially is a telnet client.

You're mistaken if you think it has ever taken a week to port (and support) an application to native primitives.

?? Bun rewrite?

If you actually try to implement the same app in multiple platforms from the same spec, you'll notice very quickly that AI makes the best quality UIs out of typescript electron or direct web. It accomplishes it's task the fastest, with the least lines of code and with the least bugs. Also hot patching updates works best with web.

And I say this as a person who isn't a web dev, but a mobile dev. This is why.

AIs are also really good at translating one complete app from one language to another where nothing changes. You'll also notice that new features will be implemented better in typescript web than iOS going further. I think this is why OpenAI changed their native swift chatgpt desktop app into web electron too.

As I said. I did a large migration from a PWA to iOS, with a pretty custom UI. It took a while, but it only took days. A full rewrite would be months of work the old way.

I have a question about web to iOS native. How do you distribute that app? I’m assuming you’re paying $99 yearly to distribute through the App Store? Is this app meant just for you or for anyone to find?

Reason I’m asking is because I’d like to make native iOS apps just for myself rather than progressive web apps. But I haven’t understood the best way to distribute.

Just for myself and friends. Using local deployment and internal TestFlight.

If just for yourself, get an Apple Dev account and use TestFlight

Or just build and deploy to your iPhone from XCode. No need for TestFlight or paying money for a dev account.

Do I need to upload a new build of the app every 90 days? I’d prefer the app to just work forever without thinking about it.

You need a paid dev account for that. I think self signed installs can run for a year.

Could be that models are not yet at the point where they are able to write code as well as we think they can.

I mean, there's a limit on the complexity of a phone workout app, but almost unbounded complexity in even simple business apps.

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