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I've never done mobile development, but I've always wondered why there isn't more of variety on third party UI frameworks for mobile, while on the JS side of UI

I've never done mobile development, but I've always wondered why there isn't more of variety on third party UI frameworks for mobile, while on the JS side of UI there are plenty of good established choices, and new choices keep popping up. I imagine some of it has to do with both webdev being more accessible, and JS as a language facilitating building frameworks. But as much as I've read people complaining about pain points of mobile development, I only see very few third party driven ui frameworks, and usually from well established companies(like Facebook with this) , not so much through community efforts. Anybody with mobile experience care to chime in?

kitsunesoba 9y ago
There's a number of factors at play. I can't speak for Android, but under iOS UIKit is extremely deep and rich in its offerings while also being (for most apps) highly efficient. It's been honed not only nearly a decade of mobile development, but also by the decades poured into its desktop ancestor AppKit. This is signified by how the vast majority of third-party iOS libraries are sugary wrappers over UIKit, and it's ridiculously hard to replace with anywhere near the same level of coverage, quality, and efficiency. Many have tried, but few have succeeded, and even "successes" are often fraught with compromise. So compared to the web, iOS is a totally different beast. It's very "batteries-included" – where installing a huge pile of third-party dependencies is the norm for front end web development, it's the exception on iOS. One can very easily craft a solid, full-featured, highly polished production-ready app with UIKit alone without too much issue, so demand for alternatives is quite low.