Ask HN: What is the current state of mobile development using Golang? - freedomben
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akmittal
Recently a new framework was released
[https://gomatcha.io/](https://gomatcha.io/). It supports iOS and Android but
runs on MacOS only. It is in early stage. Official
solution([https://github.com/golang/mobile](https://github.com/golang/mobile))
is also is in very early stage. So I think progress is there but none of the
solutions are production ready.

~~~
jacksonnic
Go mobile is pretty decent for building SDKs, I am always wary of solutions
which abstract the native APIs as you can get pinned to a particular iOS or
Android version while waiting for updates.

Go Mobile allows you to use the Go standard library and packages to build an
SDK which integrates as a library by exposing C interfaces. With Android it
creates the JNI stuff for you, iOS ObjectiveC bindings. As long as you avoid /
be aware of any other C based dependencies it is pretty safe and maintainable.

Building an iOS framework still requires a mac as it needs to shell to
xcodebuild but it does work pretty well.

With all of these tools you have to consider the Software Application
Development lifecycle. What is the lifecycle of the application, are you
prepared to completely re-write if the tooling disappears, can you suffer not
being able to use the latest native framework while waiting for tools to
update compatibility or are you prepared to pitch in and update the tooling
yourself.

For me the main complexity with native apps is the UI, these APIs require
specialist knowledge and can often wildly differ between platforms. React
Native does a good job of abstraction and maybe this coupled to GoMobile is a
dream partnership.

