
Litho: declarative framework for building efficient UIs on Android - syrusakbary
https://github.com/facebook/litho
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chamakits
I've never done mobile development, but I've always wondered why there isn't
more of variety on third party UI frameworks for mobile, while on the JS side
of UI there are plenty of good established choices, and new choices keep
popping up.

I imagine some of it has to do with both webdev being more accessible, and JS
as a language facilitating building frameworks. But as much as I've read
people complaining about pain points of mobile development, I only see very
few third party driven ui frameworks, and usually from well established
companies(like Facebook with this) , not so much through community efforts.

Anybody with mobile experience care to chime in?

~~~
kitsunesoba
There's a number of factors at play. I can't speak for Android, but under iOS
UIKit is extremely deep and rich in its offerings while also being (for most
apps) highly efficient. It's been honed not only nearly a decade of mobile
development, but also by the decades poured into its desktop ancestor AppKit.
This is signified by how the vast majority of third-party iOS libraries are
sugary wrappers over UIKit, and it's ridiculously hard to replace with
anywhere near the same level of coverage, quality, and efficiency. Many have
tried, but few have succeeded, and even "successes" are often fraught with
compromise.

So compared to the web, iOS is a totally different beast. It's very
"batteries-included" – where installing a huge pile of third-party
dependencies is the norm for front end web development, it's the exception on
iOS. One can very easily craft a solid, full-featured, highly polished
production-ready app with UIKit alone without too much issue, so demand for
alternatives is quite low.

