6 ms·

Tried the demo and it feels like a web ‘app’. Nothing says “I don’t give a crap about our users or the user experience” like building a web app or using a cros

by Aaargh20318 4y ago

Tried the demo and it feels like a web ‘app’. Nothing says “I don’t give a crap about our users or the user experience” like building a web app or using a cross-platform toolkit. It telegraphs you mainly care about doing it as cheap as you can instead of just building a good app. The only way to build a decent mobile UX is by making an actual native app. My experience with XP tools is that if you build anything but the most trivial of apps you keep running into issues where you have to do platform specific workarounds. Eventually it becomes an unmaintainable mess of exceptions and workarounds. In the long run it’s faster and easier to just build a native app for each platform. That way you can provide the native UX a user of each platform expects without compromise.

echelon 4y ago
> Nothing says “I don’t give a crap about our users or the user experience” like building a web app or using a cross-platform toolkit. It telegraphs you mainly care about doing it as cheap as you can instead of just building a good app. What a better world we'd have if Apple and Google agreed upon a common UI toolkit baseline. I'd rather a small, scrappy company spend their limited resources on solving their core competency and value prop than fitting to these two stupid and needlessly different platforms. Web should have won. It still has a good chance. We should have a "native web" in the future: WASM, hardware renderer access, device control, and more. That'll be the target to develop for. Building for Apple and Android is a total waste of annual human cognitive resources. I hope every company starts doing cross-platform.
- chii 4y ago
  > Web should have won. the web has won for a lot, but the companies that want to own their ecosystem, and have learnt from their past mistakes. Mobile is a fresh start, and they specifically made it so that web is a 2nd class citizen.
  - steve1977 4y ago
    Web is a 2nd class citizen because it’s designed for documents, not for interactive applications. All the application bits are afterthoughts and bolted on and it shows.
    - chii 4y ago
      By the time mobile was established as a platform, the web is known to be an application delivery platform. The fact that platform owners such as apple (or indeed any of them, not just singling out apple) did not make it first class is evidence that they prefer to own the platform rather than operate an open platform. Microsoft, with windows, did not understand this at the time when they had huge advantage with win32, and thus did not lock down the windows platform. You see them trying now, with windows app stores (which i'm glad is not succeeding). apple has more foresight, and decided to lockdown their app ecosystem. They deliberately removed flash as a form of application delivery, because they know that it can be good (if only adobe could pull their shit together). The fact that the web still can remain, and that people still use it, is testament that even for a system being hindered, it provides enough value. Unfortunately, it just cannot complete against platform owners who would preferentially make their own native platforms better than web.
      - steve1977 4y ago
        Apple actually wanted to have only web apps on iOS initially. They only published the iOS SDK after the outcry of developers, because web apps sucked so much. I remember this well, as I was already developing with Cocoa on Mac OS X and was pretty disappointed in the beginning when there was no SDK for iOS. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IOS_SDK#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IOS_SDK#History https://9to5mac.com/2011/10/21/jobs-original-vision-for-the-iphone-no-third-party-native-apps/ https://9to5mac.com/2011/10/21/jobs-original-vision-for-the-...
        wiseowise 4y ago
        The only bit that supports your argument is > The App Store came later and apparently as a reaction to jailbreakers and developer backlash. Which doesn’t have any source. > because web apps sucked so much Where did you get this?
- crossroadsguy 4y ago
  > solving their core competency And what is the core competency? - yet another syncing backend in 2023? - figuring out another encryption? - writing yet another web app in the guise of a mobile app? - writing a notes app that locks the content and doesn’t even let you have raw files on your computer in easily readable format? This is just absurd reasoning.
  - wiseowise 4y ago
    Things you’ve listed would be there regardless of platform they use.
ramesh31 4y ago
>The only way to build a decent mobile UX is by making an actual native app. But React Native is an actual native app. It is entirely compiled down to native code for your respective platform. I agree that the "hybrid" approaches of days gone by (Ionic, Cordova, Phonegap, et. al) were a terrible mess. But there is fundamentally no reason why RN cannot be equally performant to Swift/Kotlin based apps.
- acchow 4y ago
  > It is entirely compiled down to native code for your respective platform Has this changed recently? It’s been my understanding that react native has corresponding native components for many UI elements and uses them. But your react logic is still executing as JavaScript.
  - ramesh31 4y ago
    > But your react logic is still executing as JavaScript. Yes, but this is no different than how native works. On iOS, The JS Bridge compiles to bytecode and talks to the Obj-C runtime for native needs like Cocoa, just as Swift does. Sure you could get better performance by writing your apps directly in Obj-C, but I don't think many people want to go back to those days.
    - foreverCarlos 4y ago
      I don’t think many people left those days TBH. I personally saw how 2 large RN efforts have been rolled back to native at a big tech company. I don’t know whether RN is gaining traction or is stagnating - would love to see some stats.
      - acchow 4y ago
        You mean Facebook sized large? Not every company has the resources to hire a full on Android and iOS team. So they write React Native instead, which is good enough for most.
    - 4y ago
wiseowise 4y ago
> just building a good app. > just ? > The only way to build a decent mobile UX is by making an actual native app. And that’s the problem.

echelon 4y ago

> Nothing says “I don’t give a crap about our users or the user experience” like building a web app or using a cross-platform toolkit. It telegraphs you mainly care about doing it as cheap as you can instead of just building a good app. What a better world we'd have if Apple and Google agreed upon a common UI toolkit baseline. I'd rather a small, scrappy company spend their limited resources on solving their core competency and value prop than fitting to these two stupid and needlessly different platforms. Web should have won. It still has a good chance. We should have a "native web" in the future: WASM, hardware renderer access, device control, and more. That'll be the target to develop for. Building for Apple and Android is a total waste of annual human cognitive resources. I hope every company starts doing cross-platform.

chii 4y ago
> Web should have won. the web has won for a lot, but the companies that want to own their ecosystem, and have learnt from their past mistakes. Mobile is a fresh start, and they specifically made it so that web is a 2nd class citizen.
- steve1977 4y ago
  Web is a 2nd class citizen because it’s designed for documents, not for interactive applications. All the application bits are afterthoughts and bolted on and it shows.
  - chii 4y ago
    By the time mobile was established as a platform, the web is known to be an application delivery platform. The fact that platform owners such as apple (or indeed any of them, not just singling out apple) did not make it first class is evidence that they prefer to own the platform rather than operate an open platform. Microsoft, with windows, did not understand this at the time when they had huge advantage with win32, and thus did not lock down the windows platform. You see them trying now, with windows app stores (which i'm glad is not succeeding). apple has more foresight, and decided to lockdown their app ecosystem. They deliberately removed flash as a form of application delivery, because they know that it can be good (if only adobe could pull their shit together). The fact that the web still can remain, and that people still use it, is testament that even for a system being hindered, it provides enough value. Unfortunately, it just cannot complete against platform owners who would preferentially make their own native platforms better than web.
    - steve1977 4y ago
      Apple actually wanted to have only web apps on iOS initially. They only published the iOS SDK after the outcry of developers, because web apps sucked so much. I remember this well, as I was already developing with Cocoa on Mac OS X and was pretty disappointed in the beginning when there was no SDK for iOS. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IOS_SDK#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IOS_SDK#History https://9to5mac.com/2011/10/21/jobs-original-vision-for-the-iphone-no-third-party-native-apps/ https://9to5mac.com/2011/10/21/jobs-original-vision-for-the-...
      - wiseowise 4y ago
        The only bit that supports your argument is > The App Store came later and apparently as a reaction to jailbreakers and developer backlash. Which doesn’t have any source. > because web apps sucked so much Where did you get this?
crossroadsguy 4y ago
> solving their core competency And what is the core competency? - yet another syncing backend in 2023? - figuring out another encryption? - writing yet another web app in the guise of a mobile app? - writing a notes app that locks the content and doesn’t even let you have raw files on your computer in easily readable format? This is just absurd reasoning.
- wiseowise 4y ago
  Things you’ve listed would be there regardless of platform they use.

ramesh31 4y ago

>The only way to build a decent mobile UX is by making an actual native app. But React Native is an actual native app. It is entirely compiled down to native code for your respective platform. I agree that the "hybrid" approaches of days gone by (Ionic, Cordova, Phonegap, et. al) were a terrible mess. But there is fundamentally no reason why RN cannot be equally performant to Swift/Kotlin based apps.

acchow 4y ago
> It is entirely compiled down to native code for your respective platform Has this changed recently? It’s been my understanding that react native has corresponding native components for many UI elements and uses them. But your react logic is still executing as JavaScript.
- ramesh31 4y ago
  > But your react logic is still executing as JavaScript. Yes, but this is no different than how native works. On iOS, The JS Bridge compiles to bytecode and talks to the Obj-C runtime for native needs like Cocoa, just as Swift does. Sure you could get better performance by writing your apps directly in Obj-C, but I don't think many people want to go back to those days.
  - foreverCarlos 4y ago
    I don’t think many people left those days TBH. I personally saw how 2 large RN efforts have been rolled back to native at a big tech company. I don’t know whether RN is gaining traction or is stagnating - would love to see some stats.
    - acchow 4y ago
      You mean Facebook sized large? Not every company has the resources to hire a full on Android and iOS team. So they write React Native instead, which is good enough for most.
  - 4y ago

wiseowise 4y ago

> just building a good app. > just ? > The only way to build a decent mobile UX is by making an actual native app. And that’s the problem.