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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?

#61

Post by yesimahuman »

This is exactly the vision we have for Ionic and where we are taking it. One app that works great in the app stores and when deployed on the web (or even electron), built entirely on standard browser technologies. If you are put off by Angular, our v4 release (alpha right now but quickly heading into beta and then production ready) was rebuilt on top of web components and is framework agnostic.

It also happens to be creating some of fastest PWAs right now based on benchmarks. We built a lot of web component tech to make sure we were sending the least amount of code to the client and things like SSR and lazy loading with minimal configuration on your part (see our web component compiler Stencil we built in order to build our v4 components: http://stenciljs.com/).

http://ionicframework.com/

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

#62

Post by SeanLockItUp »

jqbx_jason wrote: post #28

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…

I'm building my first app in React Native right now - I have a native Android background though.

Can you shed some light on what some of the performance and stability issues you faced are? What can I expect and how did you deal with them or work around them?

Nice app btw!

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

#63

Post by jqbx_jason »

kovacs wrote: post #59
jqbx_jason wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks! And yeah heavily inspired by tt.fm (RIP). Hopefully the community keeps growing and can bring some of that 2011 internet magic back.

Yeah and this is smart because this time around the licensing falls on Spotify where as back then TT had to negotiate licensing if I'm not mistaken. I'm not a lawyer but if that's true this seems much more viable using Spotify's APIs with the caveat that your entire business relies on them if that's your aspiration. Regardless, wish I'd thought of this :-P Seems like it would be such a fun app to work on :-) Best of…

Yeah it's fun- and you're right about the licensing and reliance on Spotify. Hopefully it all works out but who knows :)

Sorry about the perf- it's a known issue and I'm working on it, I only recently got it (somewhat) feature complete so It's next on the list...

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

#64

Post by jqbx_jason »

SeanLockItUp wrote: post #62
jqbx_jason wrote: post #28

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…

I'm building my first app in React Native right now - I have a native Android background though. Can you shed some light on what some of the performance and stability issues you faced are? What can I expect and how did you deal with them or work around them? Nice app btw!

Sure- a couple of (oddly specific) details:

1. Long lists (>100 items) don't perform well if you have to reorder them. Initial render is a bit slow but not that noticeable but if you have to reorder or add/remove from them on the fly it can be resource intensive.

2. Animation behavior varies between Android and iOS depending on what you're animating.

3. Re-rendering is expensive so you need to be careful when you update your state if you're using redux.

4. Easily fixable but console logging is expensive so be sure to remove all JS logs from production.

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

#65

Post by CryoLogic »

gtycomb wrote: post #58
arca_vorago wrote: post #36

Pure html+css with as little js as possible... eg: websites/single page webapps over native ios/android apps

Wow. Among all conversations, haven't heard this simple truth mentioned any more. Would love to hear more discussion along these lines.

Before hybrid apps where a thing I would build HTML/CSS/JS web apps and put them in an android web-view with no controls. Easy peasy.

You can use local storage to cache for offline use. TBH I don't think most apps really need the overhead of these new libraries. Half of the apps on the app store just display and update data from a DB.

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

#66

Post by slow_donkey »

nailer wrote: post #29
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).

Wow I wasn't aware but looks like they did start with webviews and migrated to native + react native

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

#67

Post by ben_jones »

Tweak the question, instead of "is there a framework that makes this difficult task simple" ask "is this a difficult task that can be simplified without significant investment or overhead?".

Personally I don't think RN, Ionic, Electron, or any other tools completely solve all cross-platform development issues. Like all things its a tradeoff and personally I am not convinced that what we have out there is sufficient for most applications - particularly for small teams. Small apps maybe, but the second you have to go off the beaten path you will be losing weeks not hours of development time.

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

#68

Post by chrisco255 »

ben_jones wrote: post #67

Tweak the question, instead of "is there a framework that makes this difficult task simple" ask "is this a difficult task that can be simplified without significant investment or overhead?". Personally I don't think RN, Ionic, Electron, or any other tools completely solve all cross-platform development issues. Like all things its a tradeoff and personally I am not convinced that what we have out there is sufficient f…

Yeah but the alternative is to write native applications for every platform, which would easily cost you months, not weeks of development time.

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

#69

Post by slow_donkey »

pragueexpat wrote: post #51
mandebi wrote: post #48

I were looking at Vue NativeScript. Anybody on why should I not?

Also curious if someone has anything to say about Vue/Nativescript. That would be my choice as well. I'm constantly wondering why React Native gets all the attention when Nativescript seems to have so much going for it.

Imo it's hard to justify betting a product on significantly smaller communities like nativescript/weex. Also when other companies have successfully used rn in prod like fb, insta, airbnb, the stress testing has already been done for you whereas I know of exactly 0 large scale deployments on those frameworks (even flutter had the Hamilton app)

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

#70

Post by Nelkins »

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…

Xamarin (the code) is open source[0]. Only the bells and whistles (live code preview, integration with VS/VS4M, etc.) are closed source. I think.

[0] https://github.com/xamarin/Xamarin.Forms ; https://github.com/xamarin/xamarin-android ; https://github.com/xamarin/xamarin-macios

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