
Ask HN: Best way to build a mobile iOS app in 2020? - ra5
I ask this as someone who is:<p>1) Very familiar with react native, its breakage, its dependency hell, and the struggle to get the most simple apps rolling<p>2) Slightly afraid of full-on XCode and Swift<p>3) Jaded from React Native, so slightly hesitant to jump onto Flutter<p>I realize that beggars can&#x27;t be choosers, but what is the a great way to build mobile apps (iOS mainly) in 2020?
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notkaya
I'm very much a web developer, but I've been on a mobile iOS project for the
past 6 months or so.

My team decided we didn't want to fight Apple, and went all in on xcode and
swift.

The first month was rough because I do 90% of my development in vs code. Xcode
is a lot upfront, but very powerful once you get the hang of it. Spending the
time to learn how to use the storyboard properly has really paid off for us.
Our designer loves it.

Overall, if you can spare the time, doing it Apple's way isn't too bad.

My team is pretty comfortable now, with the exception of managing our git.
Storyboards can make merges almost impossible sometimes, and we really haven't
figured out a good way to go about it. So if you're working with a large team
this should be a huge con for going the swift route.

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jamil7
UIKit + SwiftUI and Combine if you're starting from scratch, plug the missing
SwiftUI features with UIKit.

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matijash
I never used but heard good things about [https://expo.io/](https://expo.io/).
Apparently they are good enough for simple apps, but might be too limiting for
more advanced stuff.

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__d
Xamarin / Mono / .NET? It's maybe a lower bar than leaping into XCode and
Swift, and it's possible to deploy on both iOS and Android if using
Xamarin.Forms ...

Not really a recommendation, but something to consider, maybe.

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thijsvandien
This will be very hard to answer without knowing anything about the kind of
app. So as always: it depends.

