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There is no better way to build a mobile app than a native app. This was shown yet again when I tried Standard Notes few days ago for the nth time. It still is

There is no better way to build a mobile app than a native app. This was shown yet again when I tried Standard Notes few days ago for the nth time. It still is sluggish and slow and felt like having too many jerks and clunks. Downright unusable for a major notes app in 2022.. well 23. Among Joplin, Obsidian, FS Notes, Bear and few more Standard Note was the worst experience by a margin. Not to mention they still not allowing local raw files citing “but encryption”, or maybe they’ve moved to another reason now. Another example of how developers can become blissfully oblivious of what users find good and start confusing it for what is “good” for developers themselves.

WhitneyLand 4y ago
Correct. >Our mobile app is just our web app There are limitations that come with this philosophy and if the trade offs aren’t stated it usually means they’re not fully considered.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
stevenhuang 4y ago
IIRC Obsidian is also built using web technologies, via Capacitor
- smcleod 4y ago
  Yep and it's dreadful as a mobile app.
  - stevenhuang 4y ago
    Hah I rather meant that as an example of a well made mobile app using web tech, like Discord. There are some UX decisions that I disagree with but I feel the underlying tech stack is solid (fast, looks good, feels native, etc)
    - smcleod 4y ago
      Are we talking about the same Obsidian app? The knowledge base / markdown editor? The iOS Obsidian app doesn't feel native at all, the interface is high latency, syncing is slow and problematic, many plugins don't work, poor touch support and serious performance issues even on the new iPhone 14 Pro. It feels like a cheap and nasty Electron / JS heavy web frame.
      - stevenhuang 4y ago
        Yup the markdown knowledge app hah. It could very well be the experience on iOS is worse. I'm using it on Android with the Pixel 6 and it's smooth as butter. For sync though I can't comment as I use syncthing. edit: Actually you're right, now that you've pointed it out I do notice slightly higher latency and animation hitches. Goes to show if you know that to look for you'll find the cracks!
        smcleod 4y ago
        Interesting that you notice it on android as well. I know I'm quite particular / sensitive to both interface latency and design, I'm aware I probably have higher standards than most people.
    - n2d4 4y ago
      Mobile Discord is also React Native (and not just as a webview wrapper), only the desktop clients use Electron
  - floppydiskette 4y ago
    Really? My experience with it has been fine, and I can’t stand sluggish apps. I mostly only use the mobile app to read, not write, though.
    - smcleod 4y ago
      I mostly use it for write on mobile. How big is your Vault?
    - Philipp0205 4y ago
      My experience with the mobile app is also very sluggish. I think there are two reasons some people experience it differently: 1. They use high-end phones and don't notice the high CPU usage of Obsidian and 2. Their vault does contain only a few hundred files.
marvindanig 4y ago
This is bad advice and just plain wrong. There are horrible slow or just badly built apps written with native stack as well. Native is worthwhile for “appstore only” businesses. Mostly. For everyone else, a universal web app is the recommended path forward. Anyone who has a web app should absolutely avoid rewriting the same business logic three times over in native languages just for the appstores. It’s a nightmare to maintain and sync up three teams and codebases, not to mention also insanely expensive. The future is pwa + webassembly + webview, and there’s no advantage of native over web whatsoever.
- catiopatio 4y ago
  Spoken like someone with a vested interest in web development. The future we should strive for is the best UX for the customer. That’s not achieved through a web stack.
  - wiseowise 4y ago
    > That’s not achieved through a web stack. What is it achieved through? Vendor locked, user and developer hostile native app stacks? > The future we should strive for is the best UX for the customer. And that’s web stack with access to system APIs.
    - JCWasmx86 4y ago
      > What is it achieved through? Vendor locked, user and developer hostile native app stacks? Yes, there is Vendor-lock in, you can't deny that. I don't know what you mean with "user-hostile" and "developer hostile". I - as user - personally ignore anything web based, if there is a native alternative, as I prefer apps that follow the HIG and use the native toolkit of the platform. Sure I'm just a single person, so this is anecdotal. > And that’s web stack with access to system APIs. No I fully disagree. A good UX is only doable, if you use native components and fully follow the HIG. I have not yet encountered a good webapp that is on par with a native app that does exactly this. Anything web based is good for "one code base - available - but subpar - for many platforms", while native apps are "One code base - one platform, but a great experience" (Given you follow the HIG and use native components) One extremely trivial example: I don't want to accidentally delete e.g. my files, just because some app thinks switching e.g. "Ok" and "Cancel" around is nice. While yes, web apps have their uses, but they can't match good native apps even remotely.
rvz 4y ago
> There is no better way to build a mobile app than a native app. Clubhouse (a native app) said the same thing years ago and ended up becoming irrelevant and its features were absorbed and overtaken by Discord (a React Native app) with its Stage Channels feature, all before Clubhouse could build it's Android app. By the time Clubhouse released its Android app, their lunch was already eaten and it was too late. It turns out that, after recently looking at their latest app build they are slowly integrating React Native in their app. This sounds like a quiet way of them admitting that they should have used React Native in the first place for both iOS and Android to release quicker had they done that as I said before. [0] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28478951 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28478951
- meowtimemania 4y ago
  I wonder why clubhouse didn't just sell to the highest bidder. Their product wasn't so complex and the user's weren't very locked in. It just didn't seem like a product/company that could succeed on its own.
  - aaronbrethorst 4y ago
    hubris. Or everyone who might've bought them recognized that Clubhouse was a fad.
    - quickthrower2 4y ago
      Clubhouse was a great idea and was mostly about the celebs not the tech. But the UX was good. It was kind of like a curated citizens band. Not sure why it failed. I personally got fed up of being the “beta in the room” not allowed to speak for the most part as the inner circles ran their rooms. Except the room about chronic illness which was a good room.
      - codetrotter 4y ago
        For me it was interesting in the beginning but after a couple of weeks my Clubhouse experience was flooded by people that were on Clubhouse trying to promote themselves or their products, without providing any value in the conversations. I stopped visiting Clubhouse because of this. I know that other people had different experiences, and that my experience is not universal. But I am probably not alone in that experience either.
afro88 4y ago
Is Bear fully native? There's a lot of non-standard feeling animation and UX in the iOS app. Makes me wonder...
Fervicus 4y ago
> Downright unusable for a major notes app in 2022.. well 23. I am not sure how the app is unusable for you. I use Standard Notes on my iPhone without any problems.
- MrLeap 4y ago
  I can help you. First you must imagine. Imagine that his device is not your device. Imagine that it is slower. Imagine it is slow enough to pass his threshold of unusable.
- dfreire 4y ago
  Same
- demetrius 4y ago
  It started to be very slow some time ago for me, on my Android (Xiaomi Redmi 6 Pro). I'm thinking about not continuing my subscription. I've attributed this to the increased number of notes, but after reading the article, I'm starting to think it might be because of the programming decisions, at least partially
jstummbillig 4y ago
> There is no better way to build a mobile app than a native app. There is, if the only tangible alternative to building a native app is not building a mobile app at all. Every application deals with some amount of sluggishness. Performance is not a mobile app only problem, it's not a new thing and it's not entirely clear, when it's going to be a big problem and when people will be okay with it. With all the strides being made, the future is almost certainly not going to be 3 code bases for 90% of simple CRUD apps, because while the problem of maintaining a lot of code is not getting better for developers, the js glue layer so many people long for most certainly is, and rapidly.
- robenkleene 4y ago
  > Every application deals with some amount of sluggishness. Performance is not a mobile app only problem, it's not a new thing and it's not entirely clear, when it's going to be a big problem and when people will be okay with it. So we're just throwing our hands up now and saying it's inevitable that a a notes app is just going to be slow? (In 2023!) We are lost. "Thou hast strayed far from the path of the Avatar. Seek now to renew a life of Virtue, lest thy soul pass finally beyond my reach!"
  - jstummbillig 4y ago
    No. We just need the sensible solutions to get better. One would be to stop the Apple/Google hostage situation, improve pwa performance and make web apps first class citizens on Mobile (the web apis to make this happen already we exist). Another one is a better translation layer. Right now the second option seems to be winning out. Asking devs to suck it up and continue down the triple code base insanity for mostly just reasonable feature parity is not one.
    - isodev 4y ago
      PWAs are more of a symptom than a solution. It's been decades, and we are yet to see solid, popular PWAs that offer the cost, performance, efficiency, and accessibility needed to offer transformative change. PWAs also don't solve the root problem of having to deal with different platforms. Many choose to imagine that Chrome is the only browser that matters, but that's far from true. Like native apps, PWAs are hostages to the platform they run on – browser makers.
emptysongglass 4y ago
Telegram's app is really performant across all platforms but I don't think it's native? Or how are we defining native?
- f1refly 4y ago
  I think at least the android app is very much native
  - kaba0 4y ago
    To my knowledge it is native on both android and ios and uses qt on the desktop (which is basically native on linux), but there is also a mac-native version.
- nextaccountic 4y ago
  On desktop Telegram may look like it's an Electron app, but it actually uses Qt I suppose that on mobile they also don't use web technologies
- MetricExpansion 4y ago
  The Telegram app is native: https://github.com/TelegramMessenger/Telegram-iOS https://github.com/TelegramMessenger/Telegram-iOS
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

WhitneyLand 4y ago

Correct. >Our mobile app is just our web app There are limitations that come with this philosophy and if the trade offs aren’t stated it usually means they’re not fully considered.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

stevenhuang 4y ago

IIRC Obsidian is also built using web technologies, via Capacitor

smcleod 4y ago
Yep and it's dreadful as a mobile app.
- stevenhuang 4y ago
  Hah I rather meant that as an example of a well made mobile app using web tech, like Discord. There are some UX decisions that I disagree with but I feel the underlying tech stack is solid (fast, looks good, feels native, etc)
  - smcleod 4y ago
    Are we talking about the same Obsidian app? The knowledge base / markdown editor? The iOS Obsidian app doesn't feel native at all, the interface is high latency, syncing is slow and problematic, many plugins don't work, poor touch support and serious performance issues even on the new iPhone 14 Pro. It feels like a cheap and nasty Electron / JS heavy web frame.
    - stevenhuang 4y ago
      Yup the markdown knowledge app hah. It could very well be the experience on iOS is worse. I'm using it on Android with the Pixel 6 and it's smooth as butter. For sync though I can't comment as I use syncthing. edit: Actually you're right, now that you've pointed it out I do notice slightly higher latency and animation hitches. Goes to show if you know that to look for you'll find the cracks!
      - smcleod 4y ago
        Interesting that you notice it on android as well. I know I'm quite particular / sensitive to both interface latency and design, I'm aware I probably have higher standards than most people.
  - n2d4 4y ago
    Mobile Discord is also React Native (and not just as a webview wrapper), only the desktop clients use Electron
- floppydiskette 4y ago
  Really? My experience with it has been fine, and I can’t stand sluggish apps. I mostly only use the mobile app to read, not write, though.
  - smcleod 4y ago
    I mostly use it for write on mobile. How big is your Vault?
  - Philipp0205 4y ago
    My experience with the mobile app is also very sluggish. I think there are two reasons some people experience it differently: 1. They use high-end phones and don't notice the high CPU usage of Obsidian and 2. Their vault does contain only a few hundred files.

marvindanig 4y ago

This is bad advice and just plain wrong. There are horrible slow or just badly built apps written with native stack as well. Native is worthwhile for “appstore only” businesses. Mostly. For everyone else, a universal web app is the recommended path forward. Anyone who has a web app should absolutely avoid rewriting the same business logic three times over in native languages just for the appstores. It’s a nightmare to maintain and sync up three teams and codebases, not to mention also insanely expensive. The future is pwa + webassembly + webview, and there’s no advantage of native over web whatsoever.

catiopatio 4y ago
Spoken like someone with a vested interest in web development. The future we should strive for is the best UX for the customer. That’s not achieved through a web stack.
- wiseowise 4y ago
  > That’s not achieved through a web stack. What is it achieved through? Vendor locked, user and developer hostile native app stacks? > The future we should strive for is the best UX for the customer. And that’s web stack with access to system APIs.
  - JCWasmx86 4y ago
    > What is it achieved through? Vendor locked, user and developer hostile native app stacks? Yes, there is Vendor-lock in, you can't deny that. I don't know what you mean with "user-hostile" and "developer hostile". I - as user - personally ignore anything web based, if there is a native alternative, as I prefer apps that follow the HIG and use the native toolkit of the platform. Sure I'm just a single person, so this is anecdotal. > And that’s web stack with access to system APIs. No I fully disagree. A good UX is only doable, if you use native components and fully follow the HIG. I have not yet encountered a good webapp that is on par with a native app that does exactly this. Anything web based is good for "one code base - available - but subpar - for many platforms", while native apps are "One code base - one platform, but a great experience" (Given you follow the HIG and use native components) One extremely trivial example: I don't want to accidentally delete e.g. my files, just because some app thinks switching e.g. "Ok" and "Cancel" around is nice. While yes, web apps have their uses, but they can't match good native apps even remotely.

rvz 4y ago

> There is no better way to build a mobile app than a native app. Clubhouse (a native app) said the same thing years ago and ended up becoming irrelevant and its features were absorbed and overtaken by Discord (a React Native app) with its Stage Channels feature, all before Clubhouse could build it's Android app. By the time Clubhouse released its Android app, their lunch was already eaten and it was too late. It turns out that, after recently looking at their latest app build they are slowly integrating React Native in their app. This sounds like a quiet way of them admitting that they should have used React Native in the first place for both iOS and Android to release quicker had they done that as I said before. [0] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28478951 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28478951

meowtimemania 4y ago
I wonder why clubhouse didn't just sell to the highest bidder. Their product wasn't so complex and the user's weren't very locked in. It just didn't seem like a product/company that could succeed on its own.
- aaronbrethorst 4y ago
  hubris. Or everyone who might've bought them recognized that Clubhouse was a fad.
  - quickthrower2 4y ago
    Clubhouse was a great idea and was mostly about the celebs not the tech. But the UX was good. It was kind of like a curated citizens band. Not sure why it failed. I personally got fed up of being the “beta in the room” not allowed to speak for the most part as the inner circles ran their rooms. Except the room about chronic illness which was a good room.
    - codetrotter 4y ago
      For me it was interesting in the beginning but after a couple of weeks my Clubhouse experience was flooded by people that were on Clubhouse trying to promote themselves or their products, without providing any value in the conversations. I stopped visiting Clubhouse because of this. I know that other people had different experiences, and that my experience is not universal. But I am probably not alone in that experience either.

afro88 4y ago

Is Bear fully native? There's a lot of non-standard feeling animation and UX in the iOS app. Makes me wonder...

Fervicus 4y ago

> Downright unusable for a major notes app in 2022.. well 23. I am not sure how the app is unusable for you. I use Standard Notes on my iPhone without any problems.

MrLeap 4y ago
I can help you. First you must imagine. Imagine that his device is not your device. Imagine that it is slower. Imagine it is slow enough to pass his threshold of unusable.
dfreire 4y ago
Same
demetrius 4y ago
It started to be very slow some time ago for me, on my Android (Xiaomi Redmi 6 Pro). I'm thinking about not continuing my subscription. I've attributed this to the increased number of notes, but after reading the article, I'm starting to think it might be because of the programming decisions, at least partially

jstummbillig 4y ago

> There is no better way to build a mobile app than a native app. There is, if the only tangible alternative to building a native app is not building a mobile app at all. Every application deals with some amount of sluggishness. Performance is not a mobile app only problem, it's not a new thing and it's not entirely clear, when it's going to be a big problem and when people will be okay with it. With all the strides being made, the future is almost certainly not going to be 3 code bases for 90% of simple CRUD apps, because while the problem of maintaining a lot of code is not getting better for developers, the js glue layer so many people long for most certainly is, and rapidly.

robenkleene 4y ago
> Every application deals with some amount of sluggishness. Performance is not a mobile app only problem, it's not a new thing and it's not entirely clear, when it's going to be a big problem and when people will be okay with it. So we're just throwing our hands up now and saying it's inevitable that a a notes app is just going to be slow? (In 2023!) We are lost. "Thou hast strayed far from the path of the Avatar. Seek now to renew a life of Virtue, lest thy soul pass finally beyond my reach!"
- jstummbillig 4y ago
  No. We just need the sensible solutions to get better. One would be to stop the Apple/Google hostage situation, improve pwa performance and make web apps first class citizens on Mobile (the web apis to make this happen already we exist). Another one is a better translation layer. Right now the second option seems to be winning out. Asking devs to suck it up and continue down the triple code base insanity for mostly just reasonable feature parity is not one.
  - isodev 4y ago
    PWAs are more of a symptom than a solution. It's been decades, and we are yet to see solid, popular PWAs that offer the cost, performance, efficiency, and accessibility needed to offer transformative change. PWAs also don't solve the root problem of having to deal with different platforms. Many choose to imagine that Chrome is the only browser that matters, but that's far from true. Like native apps, PWAs are hostages to the platform they run on – browser makers.

emptysongglass 4y ago

Telegram's app is really performant across all platforms but I don't think it's native? Or how are we defining native?

f1refly 4y ago
I think at least the android app is very much native
- kaba0 4y ago
  To my knowledge it is native on both android and ios and uses qt on the desktop (which is basically native on linux), but there is also a mac-native version.
nextaccountic 4y ago
On desktop Telegram may look like it's an Electron app, but it actually uses Qt I suppose that on mobile they also don't use web technologies
MetricExpansion 4y ago
The Telegram app is native: https://github.com/TelegramMessenger/Telegram-iOS https://github.com/TelegramMessenger/Telegram-iOS

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]