Drifty Grabs $2.6M To Turn Web Developers Into Mobile App Makers

techcrunch.com

29 points·dliebeskind··6 comments

Congrats to you folks. I had my first Spotted Cow Wisconsin-only unfiltered beer when I stopped by your Madison offices while roadtripping the US in 2013. Awesome to see things are still going well!

Has anyone used Ionic successfully? What were your thoughts?

There's many of these "native ui-kits" out now. I'm hesitant to call them "apps" because they don't really allow you to interact with the device in any meaningful way. Can't write to SD cards, can't use telephony, can't use camera/nfc/etc...

If your app is simple enough that one of these frameworks will work for you, just make a web app. Why do you need a native app if you aren't doing native things?

The apps you build with these hybrid frameworks are packaged and deployed with stuff like Cordova, which exposes all (pretty much) native functionality like camera, etc.

What happens if Apple decides to start rejecting these JS->Native Code apps built on frameworks like React Native? Because in theory it is possible to update React Native apps remotely bypassing the App Store approval process.

2.7 Apps that download code in any way or form will be rejected

2.8 Apps that install or launch other executable code will be rejected

One clarification here. Drifty/Ionic is not native...it's "hybrid", which means it simply wrapping AngularJS into a native container.

React Native actually compiles Obj-C (much like Xamarin) which is what makes it fairly revolutionary. In other words, it would be very difficult to tell the difference between someone writing native Obj-C with someone compiling it from React Native. Drifty/Ionic is simply doing transitions, taps, using the JS engine of the phone.

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