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If you were coming from the web development background, I recommend looking into something built on top of Capacitor. Personally, I use Quasar, which is built o

If you were coming from the web development background, I recommend looking into something built on top of Capacitor. Personally, I use Quasar, which is built on top of Vue but there are other things like Ionic’s offerings that will support Angular, Vue, or React. I understand what RN/Flutter are trying to do but in my opinion it’s a pain to maintain and there are just too many layers that can rot out from under you. Capacitor, on the other hand, is just a bridge from native to JS and your UI is simply HTML/CSS. This also lets your target Web with the same codebase which, while possible in RN/Flutter, is not simple or as maintainable IMHO. Nothing will beat Swift/Kotlin for platform integration (both in UI and capabilities) but maintaining 2-3 (if you want web as well) codebase is not an easy task for 1 person or even a small team. As far as capabilities, in Capacitor I can also drop down and write native code (it’s 1000x easier than it ever was with Cordova, don’t be scared off if you hated Cordova) if I want so really fully native apps only win on fitting the platform UI better.

aosaigh 3y ago
I'm interested to hear this, as I'm one of those people that hated Cordova but loved the promise of a single codebase. I was involved in a project that could only afford updates every so often, and every time I returned to try update packages it was a living nightmare. Maybe I'll give Capacitor a go.
- joshstrange 3y ago
  I won’t pretend that capacitor is all sunshine and roses, but it’s vastly superior to Cordova in that you commit the iOS and Android projects themselves instead of generating them from scratch. It means that you can make edits in Xcode or Android Studio, and they are persisted so that when you go to build the app on a build server it works pretty much the same as locally. Toss Fastlane into the mix and local dev, working as a team, and using a build server is a breeze. I write apps that process hundreds of thousands of dollars through them using Quasar+Capacitor (both taking payment through the app as a customer and using the app to talk to a Bluetooth card reader to process payments as a vendor) and without being able to share a codebase I could never have accomplished this as a solo founder.

aosaigh 3y ago

I'm interested to hear this, as I'm one of those people that hated Cordova but loved the promise of a single codebase. I was involved in a project that could only afford updates every so often, and every time I returned to try update packages it was a living nightmare. Maybe I'll give Capacitor a go.

joshstrange 3y ago
I won’t pretend that capacitor is all sunshine and roses, but it’s vastly superior to Cordova in that you commit the iOS and Android projects themselves instead of generating them from scratch. It means that you can make edits in Xcode or Android Studio, and they are persisted so that when you go to build the app on a build server it works pretty much the same as locally. Toss Fastlane into the mix and local dev, working as a team, and using a build server is a breeze. I write apps that process hundreds of thousands of dollars through them using Quasar+Capacitor (both taking payment through the app as a customer and using the app to talk to a Bluetooth card reader to process payments as a vendor) and without being able to share a codebase I could never have accomplished this as a solo founder.