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Truth is Kotlin and Swift are just a form of developer lock-in. A webapp written in React inside of a chromium webview is fast enough for most apps use cases. (

Truth is Kotlin and Swift are just a form of developer lock-in. A webapp written in React inside of a chromium webview is fast enough for most apps use cases. (NO REACT NATIVE PLEASE) The fact that Javascript is improved by many parties made the tooling and the performance of Chromium very fast. Babel+Webpack are years ahead of the build systems for both Android and iOS. Sublime and Atom are much leaner and better for coding than Android Studio and Xcode.

kuschku 7y ago
> are fast enough for most apps use cases. If that's the case, then you don't need an app in the first place, and shouldn't develop one. We don't need apps for every online store and every website. But Android is slowly limiting the power of apps further and further, until there won't be any need for apps anymore. The whole point of apps is to interact with hardware browsers don't support, to interact with files and provide high-performance functionality. To speak protocols browsers have never even considered supporting.
- anoncake 7y ago
  The point of apps is also to deliver a decent user experience that web pages just can't deliver.
  - pjmlp 7y ago
    PWAs and mobile web can deliver a decent user experience, if the developers actually bother delivering it.
    - anoncake 7y ago
      No, not at all. A decent user experience requires using the native toolkit and behaving like an actual app, not appearing in the browser. Everything else is garbage.
      - giorgioz 7y ago
        It's literally not true. Material Design for Android is just a design guideline about how the UI widgets are shaped. You can easily implement it in html/css/javascript for the browser. The official Material Design docs refer to 4 platforms currently: Android, iOS, Web and Flutter. https://material.io/components/app-bars-top/# https://material.io/components/app-bars-top/#
        kuschku 7y ago
        How do you implement the adaptive shadows, which change shape depending on where on the page they are? How do you implement diagonal corners on elements? You can implement some of Material on the web, but not all of it - which is why many components and styles are missing
- giorgioz 7y ago
  > don't need an app in the first place You need a native app if you need native features not offered by the browser but you can still use chromium webview for the UI. That's my use case at www.waiterio.com. A webview with React is fast enough for the UI but my app needs to speak with hardware using USB, TCP sockets and Bluetooth sockets. I'm fully aware of WebUSB but it doesn't work well with the hardware I use. WebUSB seems like a prototype built to work for a demo with Arduino and that's it. > But Android is slowly limiting the power of apps further and further I believe Android is adding more fine grained control of apps power permissions but I'm not sure about the reduction in power. > The whole point of apps is to interact with hardware browsers don't support I agree on this, I don't criticize apps interacting with native API/SDK. I criticize the UI systems of native apps. On paper swift/kotlin should be fast but in practice Google put so much work in optimizing Chrome and Facebook put so much work on React that Chromium+React is faster than the native UI kits.

kuschku 7y ago

> are fast enough for most apps use cases. If that's the case, then you don't need an app in the first place, and shouldn't develop one. We don't need apps for every online store and every website. But Android is slowly limiting the power of apps further and further, until there won't be any need for apps anymore. The whole point of apps is to interact with hardware browsers don't support, to interact with files and provide high-performance functionality. To speak protocols browsers have never even considered supporting.

anoncake 7y ago
The point of apps is also to deliver a decent user experience that web pages just can't deliver.
- pjmlp 7y ago
  PWAs and mobile web can deliver a decent user experience, if the developers actually bother delivering it.
  - anoncake 7y ago
    No, not at all. A decent user experience requires using the native toolkit and behaving like an actual app, not appearing in the browser. Everything else is garbage.
    - giorgioz 7y ago
      It's literally not true. Material Design for Android is just a design guideline about how the UI widgets are shaped. You can easily implement it in html/css/javascript for the browser. The official Material Design docs refer to 4 platforms currently: Android, iOS, Web and Flutter. https://material.io/components/app-bars-top/# https://material.io/components/app-bars-top/#
      - kuschku 7y ago
        How do you implement the adaptive shadows, which change shape depending on where on the page they are? How do you implement diagonal corners on elements? You can implement some of Material on the web, but not all of it - which is why many components and styles are missing
giorgioz 7y ago
> don't need an app in the first place You need a native app if you need native features not offered by the browser but you can still use chromium webview for the UI. That's my use case at www.waiterio.com. A webview with React is fast enough for the UI but my app needs to speak with hardware using USB, TCP sockets and Bluetooth sockets. I'm fully aware of WebUSB but it doesn't work well with the hardware I use. WebUSB seems like a prototype built to work for a demo with Arduino and that's it. > But Android is slowly limiting the power of apps further and further I believe Android is adding more fine grained control of apps power permissions but I'm not sure about the reduction in power. > The whole point of apps is to interact with hardware browsers don't support I agree on this, I don't criticize apps interacting with native API/SDK. I criticize the UI systems of native apps. On paper swift/kotlin should be fast but in practice Google put so much work in optimizing Chrome and Facebook put so much work on React that Chromium+React is faster than the native UI kits.