Hacker News Reader

Comment by turval | Hacker News Reader

This is probably the only feature that gives hybrid apps an actual upper-hand vs their native counterparts.

So now I could instantly push an update to my apps by hot-swapping the js code, while a native version would be stuck in a a multi-day approval process.

I can imaging there are some scenarios where getting a feature to market before a competitor would make this feature really valuable.

One question, it specifically mentions using the WebKit framework, does that mean that this is not allowed under the old UIWebView class?

View on HN

It will be a matter of choice between delivering a mediocre experience constantly or a quality one intermittently.

Companies have been doing this for a long time in the UIWebView. At a previous job, we offered this service and called it "live update". Never ran into any issues with Apple denying apps because of this. Phonegap build has a feature called Hydration that does something similar.

> One question, it specifically mentions using the WebKit framework, does that mean that this is not allowed under the old UIWebView class?

This is nothing new. We have been using UIWebView to download JS code in our App Store apps since iOS 3. You can use UIWebView or WKWebView. I don't understand why this is on the front page of HN except that someone over at Meteor is doing a good job at drawing attention to their framework.

edit: I do understand that App Store rules can be confusing and Meteor may need to have this PSA to ensure their developers feel comfortable using their framework. But ultimately it's still nothing new, not news, and probably doesn't belong the HN front page – I'm sure I wasn't the only one who clicked the link thinking it was for native apps only to be disappointed.

I see at least 3 commenters in this thread work at Meteor. It would be interesting to see exactly who upvoted it.

On a separate note: you can get away with downloading interpreted code in an iOS app, as long as you don't broadcast the fact to Apple :)

(blog post author)

We actually never upvote our own stories or ask others to. It's hard not be curious about the comments, though, and we make a point to identify ourselves in our replies.

"getting a feature to market before a competitor"

Very rarely is that ever important in the mobile app industry.

Is that because it wasn't possible or because it wasn't useful/helpful to do?

Not very useful. Mobile apps are pretty trivial to clone (clone poorly, usually), and anything remotely successfully is cloned within days of popping up on the radar.

The first-mover advantage is close to zero. The lone exception are things that are intrinsically hard to clone - deep hardware-level integration, native code that stretches the limits of current platform understanding, etc.

Which doesn't apply at all to webview-powered apps. At all.

Of course, this advantage is more than outweighed by having to use JavaScript in the first place.

Considering all of the languages that can transpile to JS, I wouldn't say that's an issue.

Now the bugs and shortcomings of CSS, that's certainly a knock against hybrid apps :)

Wasting CPU time on a mobile device by 'transpiling' is pie in the sky webdev nonsense.

Why would one transpile on the device rather than on one's dev/deployment/whatever server?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com