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Ask HN: How to Build an iPhone App in 2020?

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Re: Ask HN: How to Build an iPhone App in 2020?

#11

Post by rahulchhabra07 »

If you can learn both and can do without serving android users for a long long time, choose Swift. Use RN if only you'll need to serve both right in the first 2-3 years.

On the first glance, RN is less reliable and has performance issues. But mature apps are able to build enough to make sure these aren't issues any more.

We shifted our app from Native Android to RN. Today, it gives native like experience, have extremely fast dev times and can port it for iOS as well. But for around six months or so, the app had all these issues.

Re: Ask HN: How to Build an iPhone App in 2020?

#12

Post by gt565k »

NavyDish wrote: post #9
gt565k wrote: post #8

Use Swift. Go native or go home. I've prototyped apps with React Native, and it was a dependency nightmare. More time was spent researching and hacking in fixes and dealing with upgrading the app to the latest version than actually building the app. In contrast, we have an iOS app that was build 11 years ago, and it still runs flawlessly on the latest iOS version. Apple supports their environment, whereas, in ReactNa…

If I am looking to build an MVP and assuming that I can learn both native and React/Flutter like frameworks -- which one would you suggest based on the learning curve in both?

Do it in Swift. Swift UI is easy to work with and create the MVP interface

Re: Ask HN: How to Build an iPhone App in 2020?

#13

Post by oldprogrammer2 »

gt565k wrote: post #8

Use Swift. Go native or go home. I've prototyped apps with React Native, and it was a dependency nightmare. More time was spent researching and hacking in fixes and dealing with upgrading the app to the latest version than actually building the app. In contrast, we have an iOS app that was build 11 years ago, and it still runs flawlessly on the latest iOS version. Apple supports their environment, whereas, in ReactNa…

This was my experience with Xamarin. It was easy to get started, but then it was nearly impossible to get the "finer points" working just right. Instead of just doing "x" I was fighting the tools to get "y" to do "x", with that extra level abstraction sometimes requiring custom code to generate the right native output.

Re: Ask HN: How to Build an iPhone App in 2020?

#14

Post by mraza007 »

mikece wrote: post #6
mraza007 wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just curious why pwa compared to react native or flutter

PWA doesn't compare to React Native or Flutter as PWA is a web application whereas React Native and Flutter are cross-platform native widget approaches. The problem for React Native (and Xamarin) is that the more layers of abstraction you have the more layers that can get out of sync with the native OS. Xamarin and React Native take cross-platform UI definitions and map those onto native UI widgets and it's not unusu…

Agreed. Facebook app is completely made with react native no doubt it does get slow

Re: Ask HN: How to Build an iPhone App in 2020?

#15

Post by jamil7 »

gt565k wrote: post #8

Use Swift. Go native or go home. I've prototyped apps with React Native, and it was a dependency nightmare. More time was spent researching and hacking in fixes and dealing with upgrading the app to the latest version than actually building the app. In contrast, we have an iOS app that was build 11 years ago, and it still runs flawlessly on the latest iOS version. Apple supports their environment, whereas, in ReactNa…

I second this. SwiftUI 2.0 is nearly out and it's a huge improvement and far easier, faster and more enjoyable than React Native. Swift itself is one of the more productive languages around IMO and it can be learned gradually, it's a complex language but you can be productive using just a subset of it. Open XCode, select a starter template and away you go, no fiddling with npm dependencies or a bunch of cocoapods and objc bridging code.

Re: Ask HN: How to Build an iPhone App in 2020?

#16

Post by jamil7 »

mraza007 wrote: post #14
mikece wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PWA doesn't compare to React Native or Flutter as PWA is a web application whereas React Native and Flutter are cross-platform native widget approaches. The problem for React Native (and Xamarin) is that the more layers of abstraction you have the more layers that can get out of sync with the native OS. Xamarin and React Native take cross-platform UI definitions and map those onto native UI widgets and it's not unusu…

Agreed. Facebook app is completely made with react native no doubt it does get slow

> Facebook app is completely made with react native

I don't think thats true unless it's changed, it's mostly Objective-C with some React Native views. It's slow because it's a bloated, poorly-written mess.

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