Developing Our First iOS App with React Native • Hacker News Board

Re: Developing Our First iOS App with React Native

#21

Post by Apocryphon » Fri, Feb 26, 2016, 7:51 PM UTC

mostafaberg wrote: post #20

Why is this on the top of HN ? Honestly, this is a bad thing, not a thing to show off. To quote the author: "We're web developers, not iOS developers." EXACTLY, don't bring your web tech into native platforms, learn to do it the right way or just hire someone who knows how to do it. Seeing things like that creeping into becoming a norm makes me cringe

Regardless of your opinions on this, it's still worth examining and discussing.

Re: Developing Our First iOS App with React Native

#22

Post by hire_charts » Fri, Feb 26, 2016, 7:52 PM UTC

kin wrote: post #18

Apocryphon wrote: post #8

I'm sure this observation was probably made tens of thousands of times before, but- is the React Native and frameworks like it the beginning of the end of the "native vs. mobile web" debate? A synthesis of both approaches?

What I'm betting on is the mobile web browser. I know going HTML5 on mobile has failed in the past, but the future can still come. On desktops, desktop apps ruled until web apps became super powerful. I'm betting on the same fate for mobile web apps.

Now that Chrome supports notifications (on Android) I was able to uninstall the native Facebook app and rely exclusively on the web version (which actually loads faster for my anyway).

Still have the icon on my homescreen, still get the same notifications -- the main difference is how much better my battery life is now!

Re: Developing Our First iOS App with React Native

#23

Post by wvenable » Fri, Feb 26, 2016, 7:52 PM UTC

kin wrote: post #18

Apocryphon wrote: post #8

I'm sure this observation was probably made tens of thousands of times before, but- is the React Native and frameworks like it the beginning of the end of the "native vs. mobile web" debate? A synthesis of both approaches?

What I'm betting on is the mobile web browser. I know going HTML5 on mobile has failed in the past, but the future can still come. On desktops, desktop apps ruled until web apps became super powerful. I'm betting on the same fate for mobile web apps.

On my mobile I absolutely use and prefer native applications. I only use my mobile web browser for web browsing tasks. On my desktop, I only use my web browser for web browsing (searches, news, content, etc) and I hardly use any web applications.

I don't feel like I'm unique in this.

I think this "synthesis of both approaches" has merits.

Re: Developing Our First iOS App with React Native

#24

Post by jkdufair » Fri, Feb 26, 2016, 7:56 PM UTC

wvenable wrote: post #23

kin wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I'm betting on is the mobile web browser. I know going HTML5 on mobile has failed in the past, but the future can still come. On desktops, desktop apps ruled until web apps became super powerful. I'm betting on the same fate for mobile web apps.

On my mobile I absolutely use and prefer native applications. I only use my mobile web browser for web browsing tasks. On my desktop, I only use my web browser for web browsing (searches, news, content, etc) and I hardly use any web applications. I don't feel like I'm unique in this. I think this "synthesis of both approaches" has merits.

Searches and news are web applications. Not to mention Hacker News.

Re: Developing Our First iOS App with React Native

#25

Post by desuvader » Fri, Feb 26, 2016, 7:56 PM UTC

trollied wrote: post #9

Still, how do you get hired as a lead mobile dev without having and native platform skills? The entire development world has gone tits-up in the last 10 years. It's all about nonsense package management for JavaScript libraries (why can't I just include a .js off a cdn? npm? What the actual fuck?), and an endless stream of disparate components which are often ill-supported, or just plain ditched after they've had the…

NPM is a wonderful thing. Sure it has some perf. issues, but JS is growing faster than ever because of it.

And RN is awesome as well. RN for front-end devs is kinda what Bootstrap is for back-end devs (or any dev that doesn't like to touch HTML/CSS). Let's just be happy that we are making progress as a community and be a bit more open-minded.

Re: Developing Our First iOS App with React Native

#26

Post by currentoor » Fri, Feb 26, 2016, 7:58 PM UTC

mostafaberg wrote: post #20

Why is this on the top of HN ? Honestly, this is a bad thing, not a thing to show off. To quote the author: "We're web developers, not iOS developers." EXACTLY, don't bring your web tech into native platforms, learn to do it the right way or just hire someone who knows how to do it. Seeing things like that creeping into becoming a norm makes me cringe

This is on the top of HN because people, like me, are interested in it. You say learn to do it the "right way", by that logic we should have stuck to making desktop only apps instead of browser based web apps. I'm not saying this is better or worse. But I certainly think it's an approach worth considering.

Re: Developing Our First iOS App with React Native

#27

Post by mostafaberg » Fri, Feb 26, 2016, 7:58 PM UTC

trollied wrote: post #9

Still, how do you get hired as a lead mobile dev without having and native platform skills? The entire development world has gone tits-up in the last 10 years. It's all about nonsense package management for JavaScript libraries (why can't I just include a .js off a cdn? npm? What the actual fuck?), and an endless stream of disparate components which are often ill-supported, or just plain ditched after they've had the…

HN gives makes me feel like I'm on a JS subreddit sometimes..

Re: Developing Our First iOS App with React Native

#28

Post by leosantos » Fri, Feb 26, 2016, 8:01 PM UTC

On a more technical note - I'm exploring React Native (having significant experience shipping native iOS Apps) and while on the face of it React Native looks amazing, as I go deeper into building something production quality, I've hit roadblocks with doing simple (natively) things like scrolling a scroll view to focus on a text field that's partially visible and changing the offsets of a scroll view to prevent the keyboard from masking the focused text field in a way that doesn't appear glitchy.

Did you encounter any such problems?

Re: Developing Our First iOS App with React Native

#29

Post by warcher » Fri, Feb 26, 2016, 8:05 PM UTC

Truthfully, the language barriers are nothing next to the API barriers dealing with your platform of choice. I am probably giving away my age here, but there's very little that's new under the sun after you've tussled with... say one each of the big three language families. These being: Nasty old C (not going anywhere, ever. Deal with it.), modern scripting languages (Ruby, Python, et al) and the real deal functional languages (lisp, ml, haskell, etc). It just turns into "Oh, this is how they handle an array. Do I have any functional plumbing? Ok, great. How do I dispatch a thread? Ok, let's go." It's just not that interesting after a while.

Objective-c is quirkier than most, swift is nice but still baking, but it really all boils down to the platform APIs. And you're gonna have to get wet at a platform level if you want to provide functionality beyond a mobile web page. (Albeit one with improved load times since it's coming from disk, at the cost of dynamic updates since it's coming from the app store.)

Re: Developing Our First iOS App with React Native

#30

Post by deskamess » Fri, Feb 26, 2016, 8:06 PM UTC

wvenable wrote: post #23

kin wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I'm betting on is the mobile web browser. I know going HTML5 on mobile has failed in the past, but the future can still come. On desktops, desktop apps ruled until web apps became super powerful. I'm betting on the same fate for mobile web apps.

On my mobile I absolutely use and prefer native applications. I only use my mobile web browser for web browsing tasks. On my desktop, I only use my web browser for web browsing (searches, news, content, etc) and I hardly use any web applications. I don't feel like I'm unique in this. I think this "synthesis of both approaches" has merits.

There are times when the native app is great, but all the permissions that you have to give up have me fallback to the web version. There is a native phone app for a popular online course that has recently started asking for access to 'Phone Id/what not' on Android. Why? Just show me the videos of the courses I paid for. I refused to update and these days I just log in via Chrome and play the video on there. Not the best UX but that is what I will associate with that product going forward.

I wish Android would make something granular (and understandable) or at least let me disable permissions after the fact.