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Having just finished an 8 month Expo RN contract I'm excited to never touch it again. For personal projects keen to see how far I can go with Svelte PWA + Capac

Having just finished an 8 month Expo RN contract I'm excited to never touch it again. For personal projects keen to see how far I can go with Svelte PWA + Capacitor. Google + Microsoft should really double-down on PWA apps. I think at one point Microsoft was crawling the web and automatically listing any PWA in their app store. If that became the norm then maybe Apple will make their PWA install UX less deliberately clunky.

FlashBlaze 5y ago
Are there any disadvantages of using PWA + Capacitor instead of RN? Did you use Ionic for it?
- treelovinhippie 5y ago
  PWA + Capacitor would basically be a web wrapper with access to native APIs: https://capacitorjs.com/docs/v3/plugins https://capacitorjs.com/docs/v3/plugins I'm chasing the holy grail of "build once, run anywhere". I want to basically use Svelte and Tailwind and spit out web, iOS and Android apps. But I also want to use normal HTML components. RN, Flutter and NativeScript all have their own unique components which is another thing you need to learn. Will see how far the PWA approach can go when I find the time.
macando 5y ago
What were the issues with Expo and why haven't you ejected to vanilla RN?
- treelovinhippie 5y ago
  They ejected toward the end but that just makes development more difficult, particularly the deployment process. Expo is nice but the whole DX is just painful. The iOS Simulator will crash often. You need to do a hard 'expo start' relaunch often. What looks great in iOS will often be broken on Android. Trying to get pixel perfect UI and the desired UX is painful. Expo is full of bugs and limitations. RN is old and unmaintained.
  - dham 5y ago
    > RN is old and unmaintained Can explain the last commit being 2 days ago and the steady progress they've made on all fronts in the last year?
    - treelovinhippie 5y ago
      Try build a production app and you'll very quickly find the multi-year bugs in core components that require you to either build elaborate workarounds or 3rd party packages.

FlashBlaze 5y ago

Are there any disadvantages of using PWA + Capacitor instead of RN? Did you use Ionic for it?

treelovinhippie 5y ago
PWA + Capacitor would basically be a web wrapper with access to native APIs: https://capacitorjs.com/docs/v3/plugins https://capacitorjs.com/docs/v3/plugins I'm chasing the holy grail of "build once, run anywhere". I want to basically use Svelte and Tailwind and spit out web, iOS and Android apps. But I also want to use normal HTML components. RN, Flutter and NativeScript all have their own unique components which is another thing you need to learn. Will see how far the PWA approach can go when I find the time.

macando 5y ago

What were the issues with Expo and why haven't you ejected to vanilla RN?

treelovinhippie 5y ago
They ejected toward the end but that just makes development more difficult, particularly the deployment process. Expo is nice but the whole DX is just painful. The iOS Simulator will crash often. You need to do a hard 'expo start' relaunch often. What looks great in iOS will often be broken on Android. Trying to get pixel perfect UI and the desired UX is painful. Expo is full of bugs and limitations. RN is old and unmaintained.
- dham 5y ago
  > RN is old and unmaintained Can explain the last commit being 2 days ago and the steady progress they've made on all fronts in the last year?
  - treelovinhippie 5y ago
    Try build a production app and you'll very quickly find the multi-year bugs in core components that require you to either build elaborate workarounds or 3rd party packages.