simonhamp

You need to check out what we've been building with SuperNative - it's one codebase, but you end up with two truly native apps.

But if you could get slick native mobile apps with less code (i.e. higher quality abstractions), that would be better

Yep. It's a full copy of the state of the origin

Just use copy-on-write clones. They're way more flexible, faster and easier to reason about.

I don't get spending all this time on tooling that tries to ease working with worktrees when they're just not the right abstraction for the way we're working now.

You don't have to ditch cross-platform building entirely just to escape dependency hell

Agree to a point, but human resource is literally the main cost in most businesses, so there's that

Conway's law also plays a big part here and it's kind of TBD to see if agentic development will minify or magnify its effects

100% with you. I'm fed up of having my M3 36GB run out of memory because I have Chrome, Slack, Discord and Claude all open at the same time

That's why I'm building SuperNative

I hate to break it to you, but we already have it: it's called PHP

Seems like you've never had to worry about accessibility in hybrid apps...

Hallelujah!

One other person in this place gets it: "fewer tokens, faster progress"

Electron, Tauri, React Native/Expo, Flutter (and countless others) are the wrong kind of abstractions, built for a time pre-AI, solving pre-AI problems

We need a new post-AI abstraction that embraces this opportunity!

That's why we're building SuperNative

> you don't get native look-and-feel

You answered your own question

We're only where we are in the world of computing because of abstraction layers

It's not the layers that are the problem; they're the point.

It's the quality of those layers. React is just a poor abstraction layer

Working on this problem for the next version of NativePHP Desktop. Have dropped Electron entirely

Is more code the right goal?

We're doing it with PHP... we call it SuperNative (https://nativephp.com/blog/supernative)

What if you could have both great performance and UX for each platform AND a single codebase?

It's the cost of water processing and delivery, infra (plumbing) maintenance, chemical treatment...

I'm working to solve this...

Why would they need to worry about hiring for specific skills at all? As AI progresses, isn't the only skill that matters that you can drive it effectively (which encompasses testing and review) without needing oversight?

More code means more people. That's not peanuts

As the builder of a post-AI, cross-platform native app building framework like React Native, I 100% believe this to be a backwards move.

I've written up a load of thoughts about that here[1], but in summary for the Shopify case, they're basically going to be spending a ton more than they have to by switching back to multiple apps and I'd predict another swing back to better cross-platform tooling in the coming years.

[1]: https://nativephp.com/blog/why-not-write-it-twice

CoW doesn't require reinstall of dependencies as they're part of the same directory tree, so should be immediately accessible (I've been using this way for a couple months now and it works fine)

The application running (port config) problem is an issue for frameworks and build tools to figure out around the shift towards multiple live working copies at once

The tools that facilitate this will win imo

I use Laravel Herd along with Polyscope (made by the same company). Together they enable CoW clones with their own dev domains - it's zero setup and works super well for my use-case

I can see a simpler version of the same thing being very neat dev experience across many stacks

This is a guest post from Saurav Pathak, CPO at Bagisto, the open-source Laravel eCommerce platform. Bagisto's mobile admin, NativeBagisto, is built with NativePHP and available on the Play Store.

This article has not been sponsored or paid for.

Fascinating! Thanks for sharing

NativePHP

No snark. Genuinely happy. This is progress

React kid discovers the web

Thanks! Fixed

NativePHP & Bifrost

https://nativephp.com

https://bifrost.nativephp.com

A two-man team, we're enabling PHP developers to get into mobile app development as easily as possible - no need to learn new languages, no new skills, just a few commands and away you go.

NativePHP is the library. Bifrost is the build and release service, getting apps into the stores faster than anything else.

This month we're planning to release the first fully open source version of the Mobile package.

How's it going?

We've sold over 2,000 licenses since May. We built Bifrost over the summer and it already has almost 300 monthly subscribers.

We just gave away another 1,000 licenses to the African PHP community.

Or perhaps surgically appended into your palm or something...