Lots of time is spent understanding what the product needs to do and building a suitable solution to it that is intuitive for users. The resulting JS code does

Lots of time is spent understanding what the product needs to do and building a suitable solution to it that is intuitive for users. The resulting JS code does not always represent a large portion of the investment into delivering the end-to-end product. In my subjective experience, the JS is written more quickly, requiring overall time to get something working. An idea might change course in significant ways a few times in the span of time it would have taken to write it in C/C++ once. In our setup, apps leverage key lower level libraries that are maintained by a small team and represent a much smaller, more manageable native codebase. A very complex app can be written in 10k LoC. Yes, there are a lot of "apps". > Also, there's a huge difference between maintaining 3000 apps with 10k LoC and maintaining even one app with >1m LoC. I said exactly this at the end of my post, but I don't feel it is always black and white. I said "apps" in quotes above because many times they act more like modules than standalone apps. Many of them interact in non-trivial ways, making the comparison more muddled. It's definitely a lot of code either way and in our situation JS has definitely made evolving the product much easier from an end-user perspective. edit: ^once