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Ask HN: How are you building cross-platform (mobile and browser) apps?

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Re: Ask HN: How are you building cross-platform (mobile and browser) apps?

#21

Post by thrownaway954 »

tsmall wrote: post #7

Depending on your needs, using something like Turbolinks [1] may be a great fit. There are iOS and Android libraries that can make your web app talk to your native app so it can do things like trigger screen transitions, populate native menu or tab controls, etc. We're using a similar idea at my company and so far it's been very successful for us. [1]: https://github.com/turbolinks/turbolinks/#readme

there was a talk at RailsConf 2016 by Sam Stephenson about how Basecamp used Turbolinks to create version 3 of their, an android and ios version in 18 months.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWEts0rlezA

Re: Ask HN: How are you building cross-platform (mobile and browser) apps?

#22

Post by soulnothing »

I've been using Kotlin for the past few years. The multi platform support is getting really nice. Ios is the lagging participant, but with the upcoming conference alot of the niggling bugs should be addressed. Right now JVM, android, and js are all stable.

Writing a graphql endpoint emitting a data class. Then have react directly cast to that same data class. With proper type safety is great.

There are bugs but they feel like fringe cases. I spent half a day cleaning up my bindings to react material ui. An hour or two fighting serializaiton bugs. Those are the biggest time sinks that come to mind. It's still marked as experimental but it's something to keep an eye on.

Re: Ask HN: How are you building cross-platform (mobile and browser) apps?

#23

Post by dangoor »

At Khan Academy, our award-winning[1] mobile apps are a combination of native + React Native + web view. The React Native part is relatively new, but it's definitely helping us to move a lot faster in developing our apps.

A few years ago, I worked on a project in Xamarin with some success. The iteration cycle with React Native is far faster, though.

[1] https://blog.google/products/google-play/winners-2018-google...

Re: Ask HN: How are you building cross-platform (mobile and browser) apps?

#24

Post by aerodog »

Decided to give a go at React XP. Based on their claims, they're good because:

- React Native Web and React Native (iOS/Android) are handled in one go

- Windows Support

- Stripped down so nothing from within will work on iOS but not Android, for example, as is the case with React Native...

- Lots of components from Material UI (just launched v.1) can work right on top without too much of a hitch

Caveat: we're just getting started, so I don't want to oversell this. But faced with a similar problem, this route seemed optimal at this time.

Re: Ask HN: How are you building cross-platform (mobile and browser) apps?

#25

Post by WhitneyLand »

andrewstellman wrote: post #17

Consider taking a look at the Visual Studio tools, which have really matured over the last few years: https://www.visualstudio.com/vs/features/modern-web-tooling/ Specifically, tools for Apache Cordova: https://www.visualstudio.com/vs/features/cordova/ (disclaimer: I haven't used them, but I've heard very positive feedback)

1) The Microsoft development product line is great at some things, but not for directly enabling cross web/mobile solutions. However do use VS Code as the environment for other solutions mentioned here.

2) If you are a non-MS person, make sure you don’t miss out on the greatness of Visual Studio Code by dismissing it as yet another Windows centric product. VS Code is world class performant, has a great plugin arch/ecosystem, and somehow combines a hardcore developer first mindset with carefully thought out UX at the same time.

Also to be clear for those not much in the MS world, the “Visual Studio“ product line you’ve heard of for decades is not the same thing. It’s confusing naming but Visual Studio Code is relatively new and very different.

Re: Ask HN: How are you building cross-platform (mobile and browser) apps?

#28

Post by jqbx_jason »

I use React + React Native for https://www.jqbx.fm. As a 1 man project it seemed like the only sensible way to build mobile (android/iOS) and browser versions. I can share almost all of the code (where applicable) so one can move a lot faster and have a lot less mental overhead.

That being said React Native has stability and performance issues that are tricky and can hold up your app for a non-trivial amount of time. Also staying on top of updates requires diligence and can be a pain. But if you're looking for the quickest path to market I would say look no further.

Re: Ask HN: How are you building cross-platform (mobile and browser) apps?

#29

Post by nailer »

gldalmaso wrote: post #19

You should consider your target audience and your own resources. For consumer facing apps, I'm not sure an hybrid (cordova / ionic / webview shell) approach is really up to par, as the UX is really challenging to make right and performance will be lacking. That said, a native approach requires twice the codebase and twice the resources (man hours) roughly, so the challenge becomes maintaining feature parity and team…

Instagram is pretty popular, has a good UX and is built on a webview (ocne a year on a shitty connection the CSS doesn't load and you see it).

Re: Ask HN: How are you building cross-platform (mobile and browser) apps?

#30

Post by kenmicklas »

Haskell on web, Android, iOS, desktop (and shared code with the server of course) with https://github.com/reflex-frp/reflex-platform

It's pretty hard to beat the productivity of one codebase for every platform with a powerful type system catching errors across every part of system.

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