
Show HN: Rumblelist, a React-based task app. Trying to build mobile version - feech
https://www.rumblelist.com/why-another-task-manager/
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acjohnson55
Maybe consider a progressive web application (PWA). A couple interesting
articles I've read recently:

[https://medium.com/javascript-scene/native-apps-are-
doomed-a...](https://medium.com/javascript-scene/native-apps-are-doomed-
ac397148a2c0#.b7sc3dk4m)

[https://medium.com/javascript-scene/why-native-apps-
really-a...](https://medium.com/javascript-scene/why-native-apps-really-are-
doomed-native-apps-are-doomed-pt-2-e035b43170e9#.5o8kxffx3)

~~~
feech
Started reading those articles and immediately loved it. I did a bit of
research a few weeks back because I had already been considering this
approach. The consensus seemed to be that the app would suffer from
performance issues primarily.

~~~
feech
Ok, so I read through those articles and my curiosity is peaked. If you had to
guess, what would be your ETA on support for PWA's on IOS.. I think thats the
elephant in the room.

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tyingq
I'm somewhat curious if native mobile apps might start falling out of
favor...at least for apps that mostly pull outside data.

I see the advantage for things that run fully (or mostly) locally, like games.

I don't really understand the advantage for other types of applications.
Airline apps are a good example. Everything that's interesting about them
requires live data that isn't stale. Yet these types of apps are very popular.
I assume browsers will start closing on whatever functional gaps make it this
way. The wasted time/effort to create 4 distinct experiences (desktop, mobile
web, IOS, Android) irks me.

~~~
feech
To me, personally, its the trade off. A well built responsive HTML based UX is
the easiest development approach. The thing that concerns me is that I don't
know how much "easier" mobile dev can get, and I don't think it can come
anywhere close to raw web based dev. So I concur :-)

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axemclion
If you guys are trying react native, you could try mobile.azure.com for the
devops pipeline.

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feech
This is a new app I am trying to launch. We had a ton of success with React as
the web app, but building the mobile stuff has really slowed us down.

~~~
mwcampbell
Can you say more about the obstacles you've encountered building the mobile
app? Just curious.

~~~
feech
So, first off, I've never done mobile, but I've been writing software for 30
years. The biggest issues are probably obvious and are heard all over the
place:

1) cross platform mobile-app development is a nightmare. I tried Xamarin and
gave up because I felt like I would have to learn an whole new layer of syntax
to do any UX work. Also the build times, the heavy lifting that was going to
be required to setup the simulation environments, etc. just didn't make sense.

2) Setting up your development environment is just a complete nightmare. After
a week or two of messing around, I finally got the Android emulators working
at reasonable performance on my Windows machine. Still haven't even attempted
to hook up a mac.

3) The amount of third party code, npm modules, and pre-processing required to
build the simplest shell application is astounding. My current "shell" app,
after first build, is 32k files and almost 300MB. Its absurd. and the app
doesn't even do ANYTHING yet. The problem with all this code is that no one
can possibly understand ALL this plumbing, and the instant something goes
wrong, you're immediately sucked into non-productive rabbit holes.

All that being said, this is an awesome learning experience. I've been
avoiding mobile development for years hoping it would mature, and I guess it
has somewhat, but at this point, feeling like I won the lottery when I finally
was able to set a breakpoint in my VS Code editor, run a react-native
application through the emulator and hit the breakpoint. Ha!

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bsaul
It's something all software developer i know always underestimate when they
think about mobile development. The ecosystem and tools are so abysmally bad
compared to desktop or server development or even web now, that most of them
don't understand the high development cost or the difficulty of doing high
quality code.

Even Apple, which control everything from cpu design to compiler to
programming language to IDE don't manage to have anything decent. xcode should
be rewritten from scratch, swift compiler crash every two lines, iOS is
becoming cumbersome and starts to show its age, new tech like autolayout is
slow as hell or simply doesn't work (core data on icloud), compiling takes
ages, xib and xcodeproj file format crash and burn as soon as you start to
collaborate with git, deploying to the appstore still feels like rolling a
dice (whenever the uploading itself doesn't bug), and in addition to all this
mess, you give them 30% of your income. And when you think it's over, you
realize they butcher your income report ( in pretty pretty csv file format) if
you don't download them after two months.

The only thing that saves them is that android has managed to have an even
worse experience.

Honestly, there's so much room today for a new mobile ecosystem, i wouldn't be
surprised if either microsoft, or a newcomer from china starts to make a
revolution in some way pretty soon. If microsoft were to resurrect windows
mobiel together with a good phone, as well as a good C# + visual studio
programming environment, i may sincerely give it a try, at least for my b2b
applications.

~~~
feech
I completely agree on every point. Developers are such a creative bunch, I'm
just surprised this has gone on so long. I went into this wary but hopeful
that mobile dev had gotten to a good point, but I am just not seeing it.

I'd love to be able to just hook my editor up to a cloud environment that took
care of all this for me :-)

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bhtp
The scroll to top button appears to cover the live chat button on mobile.

