Nothing says “I don’t give a crap about our users or the user experience” like building a web app or using a cross-platform toolkit. It telegraphs you mainly care about doing it as cheap as you can instead of just building a good app.
The only way to build a decent mobile UX is by making an actual native app.
My experience with XP tools is that if you build anything but the most trivial of apps you keep running into issues where you have to do platform specific workarounds. Eventually it becomes an unmaintainable mess of exceptions and workarounds.
In the long run it’s faster and easier to just build a native app for each platform. That way you can provide the native UX a user of each platform expects without compromise.
>The only way to build a decent mobile UX is by making an actual native app.
But React Native is an actual native app. It is entirely compiled down to native code for your respective platform. I agree that the "hybrid" approaches of days gone by (Ionic, Cordova, Phonegap, et. al) were a terrible mess. But there is fundamentally no reason why RN cannot be equally performant to Swift/Kotlin based apps.
This is not accurate. There’s a JS bridge to a lot of non native elements. You can get acceptable performance out of RN if you know what you’re doing but it will never match true native code.
> It is entirely compiled down to native code for your respective platform
Has this changed recently? It’s been my understanding that react native has corresponding native components for many UI elements and uses them. But your react logic is still executing as JavaScript.
> But your react logic is still executing as JavaScript.
Yes, but this is no different than how native works. On iOS, The JS Bridge compiles to bytecode and talks to the Obj-C runtime for native needs like Cocoa, just as Swift does.
Sure you could get better performance by writing your apps directly in Obj-C, but I don't think many people want to go back to those days.
Sorry... what? The more I read this, the more asinine it sounds.
Some definitions:
- The Obj-C runtime is just a shared library that Swift links to on compilation (/usr/lib/libobjc.A.dylib). The performance to call into it is identical for Swift and Obj-C.
- "Sure you could get better performance by writing your apps directly in Obj-C..." Swift code is native code. Cost to access the runtime is identical.
- There is one "hop" to go from Swift to the Obj-C runtime.
That's an interesting take that I don't agree with.
It could be extended to pretty much anything: "I'm insulting your clothes, not you".
Calling something that a person says, or writes "asinine" is inflammatory. If I were to call your defense of it "naive, brain dead and utterly absurd" are you sure you wouldn't interpret that as a personal attack?
> Calling something that a person *says or writes* "asinine" is inflammatory
Yes, inflammatory. But personal, no.
> If I were to call your defense of it "naive, brain dead and utterly absurd" are you sure you wouldn't interpret that as a personal attack?
Correct, because it's not personal. That would be attacking the quality of the argument, not me, although it would certainly be inflammatory. I certainly wouldn't take it well — but for a totally different reason than you originally specified.
"Personal" and "inflammatory" are two different things.
I’m sorry what?? Native code gives you access to libdispatch and concurrency. RN is single threaded. There are a myriad of processes, shared memory, optimizations, and daemons that run on your phone that coordinate better with native binaries.
Web won’t beat native on mobile phones, I’m sorry this argument has been had every single year it’s just absurd we keep arguing about it.
RN is implemented due to developer productivity at the cost of user experience. Which is fine more power to you, but understand that it doesn’t imply better UX.
The barriers to creating apps is also getting smaller (SwiftUI & Jetpack Compose).
Source: Multiple years working on Core Apple systems at Apple and also multiple years at Google
I don’t think many people left those days TBH. I personally saw how 2 large RN efforts have been rolled back to native at a big tech company. I don’t know whether RN is gaining traction or is stagnating - would love to see some stats.
You mean Facebook sized large? Not every company has the resources to hire a full on Android and iOS team. So they write React Native instead, which is good enough for most.
Objective-C actually gets compiled down to machine code at compilation down. When you download an app from the app store, there is no more Objective-C.
RN doesn't "compile" the Javascript to bytecode or machine code. Instead, the closest competition you could get from RN is a JIT. But AFAIK iOS doesn't allow a Javascript JIT to run, so the JavaScript running is not being JITed to Bytecode.
Even if you assume that iOS allows a JS JIT now, you still have a JavaScript->Native bridge to cross. This adds a performance hit that Objective-C does not have.
You do realize that RN runs on single thread right? Have you tried implementing background processes in RN? I suggest you try also implementing push notification in RN.
> Nothing says “I don’t give a crap about our users or the user experience” like building a web app or using a cross-platform toolkit. It telegraphs you mainly care about doing it as cheap as you can instead of just building a good app.
What a better world we'd have if
Apple and Google agreed upon a common UI toolkit baseline.
I'd rather a small, scrappy company spend their limited resources on solving their core competency and value prop than fitting to these two stupid and needlessly different platforms.
Web should have won. It still has a good chance. We should have a "native web" in the future: WASM, hardware renderer access, device control, and more. That'll be the target to develop for.
Building for Apple and Android is a total waste of annual human cognitive resources. I hope every company starts doing cross-platform.
the web has won for a lot, but the companies that want to own their ecosystem, and have learnt from their past mistakes. Mobile is a fresh start, and they specifically made it so that web is a 2nd class citizen.
Web is a 2nd class citizen because it’s designed for documents, not for interactive applications. All the application bits are afterthoughts and bolted on and it shows.
By the time mobile was established as a platform, the web is known to be an application delivery platform.
The fact that platform owners such as apple (or indeed any of them, not just singling out apple) did not make it first class is evidence that they prefer to own the platform rather than operate an open platform.
Microsoft, with windows, did not understand this at the time when they had huge advantage with win32, and thus did not lock down the windows platform. You see them trying now, with windows app stores (which i'm glad is not succeeding).
apple has more foresight, and decided to lockdown their app ecosystem. They deliberately removed flash as a form of application delivery, because they know that it can be good (if only adobe could pull their shit together).
The fact that the web still can remain, and that people still use it, is testament that even for a system being hindered, it provides enough value. Unfortunately, it just cannot complete against platform owners who would preferentially make their own native platforms better than web.
Apple actually wanted to have only web apps on iOS initially. They only published the iOS SDK after the outcry of developers, because web apps sucked so much.
I remember this well, as I was already developing with Cocoa on Mac OS X and was pretty disappointed in the beginning when there was no SDK for iOS.
PS: As Steve Jobs was good friends with Larry Ellison, I can imagine he truly believed web apps would be sufficient (as Ellison was a long time proponent of them already).
However I think while web apps can be „good enough“ [1] for many business applications (i.e. basically data entry and reporting), they weren’t good enough for what consumers wanted.
[1] I mean people still accept suffering from stuff like SAP
Google was and still is the canonical Web Company. Android went with Java and custom APIs over the web stack. More than a decade later and this hasn't changed. The new Android UI layer is Jetpack Compose - again, not the web.
At the same time, Palm decided to redo their own OS and they went all-in on the web stack. They even called it WebOS. Palm were a well known name with momentum and talented staff, but WebOS was a failure partly due to poor performance.
Nothing says “I don’t give a crap about our users or the user experience” like building a web app or using a cross-platform toolkit. It telegraphs you mainly care about doing it as cheap as you can instead of just building a good app.
The only way to build a decent mobile UX is by making an actual native app.
My experience with XP tools is that if you build anything but the most trivial of apps you keep running into issues where you have to do platform specific workarounds. Eventually it becomes an unmaintainable mess of exceptions and workarounds.
In the long run it’s faster and easier to just build a native app for each platform. That way you can provide the native UX a user of each platform expects without compromise.