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Too many articles like this on HN lately - short, useless, lead to an ad. This looks like SEO crap, outsourced to Mechanical Turk or Upwork.
The author's "business people" is transparently a euphemism for "clueless technologist" but what they actually care about is finance. Specifically, the time value of money and why they don't want to hire another two people to do Android and iOS in addition to the Web.
The marketing message from the cross-platform framework folks was aimed well and hit the mark. "Spend your time and money with us (or our consultants), not your expensive and peculiar developers. Together we'll achieve 3x the results for 1x the cost!"
From the article: "Sign up for my email newsletter and get a free framework decision email course. You'll learn effective ways to research framework pros and cons." It's an ad. Too many articles like this on HN lately - short, useless, lead to an ad. This looks like SEO crap, outsourced to Mechanical Turk or Upwork.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The important parts of your business are in the backend, and should be accessible in json format. If you have a good api, developing native clients should be simple and fast. But what I have seen are very confident web frontend devs (and product managers too) who only consider web solutions, and dismiss native apps as being duplicated work.
The important parts of your business are in the backend, and should be accessible in json format. In my experience the backend of most non-tech and some tech businesses is a database and some trivial validation rules. Everything important is in the design of how the data is displayed on the front end.
"That being said, if you’re making a game, it probably won’t work in cross-platform" I feel like gaming is the easiest thing to do cross-platform since you don't rely on any native UI and OpenGL is pretty similar on different platforms. Unity, Unreal Engine, and many others are designed to target many platforms.
Well, it's not the software side that's difficult. Generally, it's the user interaction story that's troublesome. In terms of games, it generally a question of console, mobile, and PC/Mac. In that sense, the size of screen, the controller and/or gamepad versus keyboard/mouse versus touch input. Each will give players different advantages than players on other platforms. It's a bit more difficult to do cross-platform…
You say that, but plenty of games, including twitch shooters, have been successful using Unity and Unreal, both of which support a pretty large number of platforms.
"That being said, if you’re making a game, it probably won’t work in cross-platform" I feel like gaming is the easiest thing to do cross-platform since you don't rely on any native UI and OpenGL is pretty similar on different platforms. Unity, Unreal Engine, and many others are designed to target many platforms.
- Cross platform does not mean you can share the UI/design. Different mobile platforms require different accordances that users are accomstomed to. So your design and code might have to be different, just as it would be for native.
- Just because you are using a cross platform framework does not mean you sidestep the nuances of the framework itself or that of the host platform. In fact, it just makes things worse because you have to code around these nuances. Due to the underlying way iOS/Android work (e.g. permissions or the differences between Android’s activities or UIViewController on iOS), you will still need a fair amount of platform specific code.
- Many cross platform frameworks have limited support for other libraries and if not you need to go native to support them. At this point you may as well be developing natively.
- The performance can matter quite a bit. However, unlike native your ability to do anything to resolve these issues is extremely limited. Maybe it doesn’t matter a ton depending on the use case, but people do notice. Only being able to solve it by dropping into native sort of defeats the purpose of cross platform.
When you add all these up, the benefits of cross platform get very muddled.
It is far better to prove out your app on one platform, get users, solve problems, and when you have more resources and a good process, go to other platforms. If you don’t succeed on one platform, not being cross-platform would be an unlikely reason.
In the case of React Native, it is possible to have a hybrid, which may let you get around some trade offs.
From the article: "Sign up for my email newsletter and get a free framework decision email course. You'll learn effective ways to research framework pros and cons." It's an ad. Too many articles like this on HN lately - short, useless, lead to an ad. This looks like SEO crap, outsourced to Mechanical Turk or Upwork.
Yeah, me feel the same. How do people game HN?
Sounds like a bot wrote that
What? Ever heard of Unity, powering the majority of games out there?
From the article: "Sign up for my email newsletter and get a free framework decision email course. You'll learn effective ways to research framework pros and cons." It's an ad. Too many articles like this on HN lately - short, useless, lead to an ad. This looks like SEO crap, outsourced to Mechanical Turk or Upwork.
Yeah, me feel the same. How do people game HN?