The Future of Mobile App Dev – Q&A with Heyzap, Firebase, Apportable, Optimizely

blog.heyzap.com

18 points·immad··5 comments

Is there any hope of being able to develop Android & iOS apps with close-to-native characteristics using web-like development technologies (mainly, JavaScript)? Seemed like Appcelerator was going in that direction but not sure what happened. Is React Native the possible answer?

From the panel it seemed like ReactNative was the best hope for that right now. See http://www.reactnative.com/

Appcelerator has been very successful. However, the learning curve for complex apps can be a bit steep.

Once you've the hang of it, it's so much faster and easier, and removes so many of the platform specific quirks and limitations.

Especially for business focused apps, Titanium is an easy choice. The shops who are best at it have been doing it for years, and don't really want to give away their advantage -- most are too busy cranking out apps to write blog posts about it.

React is trendy, but Appcelerator has proven itself time and again in the market. It's really hard to have comprehensive cross-platform API coverage, React is going to be behind for quite a while.

Appcelerator lost me when it switched to the whole Alloy thing that I don't really understand. And their most helpful evangelist bailed.

I can understand that -- I stayed off Alloy, I'd already created Tiger [1]. Tiger is very similar to React in that Views are just JS Objects. Conversely, React's JSX is very similar to Alloy. I think XML is a backwards approach these days, but naturally many devs are comfortable with it so it continues.

The tiDev.io lead just joined Appcelerator as their new evangelist [2], I think he could be a good shot in the arm for the community.

[1] https://github.com/doublerebel/tiger

[2] http://www.tidev.io/2015/02/02/goodbye/

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