The not so hidden cost of sharing code between iOS and Android • Hacker News Board

Re: The not so hidden cost of sharing code between iOS and Android

#231

Post by NateEag » Thu, Aug 15, 2019, 10:35 AM UTC

Dylan16807 wrote: post #152

NateEag wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. If the user interface is usable and snappy, it is probably fine that it consumes twice as many resources as a similar native app would require for the same result. Example: Slack.app is a huge memory hog (though not as bad as it was before their rewrite), but it fits decently into OS X and does not lag on me. I have lots of RAM, so the extra consumption is fine. Sure, it annoys some programmers that it could be m…

God I wish it was only twice the memory. Twice would be acceptable. Discord by itself likes to push to a full gigabyte to show me 50 lines of text with avatars and 0-5 thumbnails of images. Even worse it's using significant amounts of video card memory, and I have a tenth as much of that.

Fair enough. I've never actually hit performance problems on my current machines, so I've never looked closely at actual resource usage.

Re: The not so hidden cost of sharing code between iOS and Android

#232

Post by olalonde » Thu, Aug 15, 2019, 10:36 AM UTC

As usual, what is true for a 1000+ people org might not be true for your bootstrapped startup.

Re: The not so hidden cost of sharing code between iOS and Android

#233

Post by jkereako » Thu, Aug 15, 2019, 10:53 AM UTC

This article hits close to home. I've been working with Xamarin for almost two years now. It has done its job and provided a quick avenue to prototype a concept and deliver a product. However, as the article mentions, the maintenance is a bear. Here are some of the issues I face:

- The developer experience is awful. Visual Studio for Mac causes so many issues (crashes, mangled project files) it hinders productivity. About once every two weeks I spend half a day wrestling with a VS issue.

- As AirBnB's article mentioned, to be effective in cross-platform development, you need to know three platforms well which is a difficult task.

- Xamarin's performance on Android has notoriously been poor and only has marginally improved. Try using a Xamarin app on a cheaper Android device or an older version of Android.

- No mobile engineers want to work on Xamarin.

That said, the good news about working with Xamarin is that it exposed me to C# and the .NET ecosystem. I'm truly impressed with these technologies.

EDIT

I forgot to mention that I think the complexity of an app ought to determine whether a cross-platform technology is a good idea. Xamarin is a great solution for prototypes and simple apps.

Re: The not so hidden cost of sharing code between iOS and Android

#234

Post by dingle_thunk » Thu, Aug 15, 2019, 11:14 AM UTC

darthmajor wrote: post #166

weq wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article says it all - they chose the wrong language with no community support for the trail they were blazing and that technical debt destroyed their productivity. I achieved 90+% code share in Xamarin including UI across windows - ios - andriod. 100% buisness logic shared. You can write cross-platform UIs, and swap out to native code on a widget by widget basis. Threading is seemless. Sure it has its own set of…

Xamarin on paper seems like the holy Grail, but the fact that Microsoft itself chose to use react native instead of its own solution for Skype made it seem like I should not expect long term commitment to xamarin from MS.

The Skype engineering team is an acquisition with relative autonomy, and is always making weird choices. Wouldn't take that too seriously.

Re: The not so hidden cost of sharing code between iOS and Android

#235

Post by jamil7 » Thu, Aug 15, 2019, 11:32 AM UTC

The cross platform landscape is pretty daunting for a solo dev. I ended up just writing my app natively, time will tell if that was the right decision or not. Most of my business logic is handled by my backend. I like the performance and being able to implement platform specific features as soon as they're released. I might look into doing some codesharing in Rust if it becomes more straightforward. Sometimes it's OK to write things twice.

Re: The not so hidden cost of sharing code between iOS and Android

#236

Post by king_magic » Thu, Aug 15, 2019, 11:48 AM UTC

jkereako wrote: post #233

This article hits close to home. I've been working with Xamarin for almost two years now. It has done its job and provided a quick avenue to prototype a concept and deliver a product. However, as the article mentions, the maintenance is a bear. Here are some of the issues I face: - The developer experience is awful. Visual Studio for Mac causes so many issues (crashes, mangled project files) it hinders productivity.…

I’ve come to almost exactly the same conclusions. And it really is sad: Xamarin developer tools used to be decent, almost even good.

Today? I’d rather try to build mobile apps in COBOL than Xamarin. The developer tools are so broken, so buggy, and so poorly documented that it’s just not worth it.

I thought Microsoft purchasing Xamarin would have made things better at the lowest level of the dev tools stack - hey, finally some investment will go toward shoring up the dev stack! Nope, apparently not.

Years later, trying to connect VS for Windows to a Mac build server is still astoundingly, soul-crushingly broken. No way to get support. No straightforward way to file bugs.

Just a truly awful developer experience.

Re: The not so hidden cost of sharing code between iOS and Android

#237

Post by K0nserv » Thu, Aug 15, 2019, 12:23 PM UTC

mmastrac wrote: post #67

We've had a mostly different (positive) experience doing a similar thing at FullStory for mobile instrumentation, though I think I know where some of the key differences are. Our core "business logic" lives in Rust. This is a shared bit of code between Android & iOS that mainly deals with orchestration, serialization, and server communication. We managed to extract ~1/2 of each platform's native code into this shared…

That’s super interesting. I really like Rust, definitely my favourite language recently. I’ve been thinking a lot about the pattern you are using with Rust for the shared layer. Have you got an engineering blog or something with more details?

Re: The not so hidden cost of sharing code between iOS and Android

#238

Post by babesh » Thu, Aug 15, 2019, 12:29 PM UTC

chadaustin wrote: post #186

cbsks wrote: post #131

It seems like the real issue was that Dropbox lost all of their senior C++ engineers. That’s a real mistake on their part, losing the only people who truly understand your product can be a death sentence for a company. I know my employer is very conscious of who knows what part of our products, and does their best to ensure that we never have any knowledge gaps.

You’re definitely warm. I worked at Dropbox around this time and there was very little C++ or systems experience in the building. I think it’s expertise they tried to build but for whatever reason didn’t. I work at Facebook now and the difference is night and day. FB does share a ton of code across platforms, and it doesn’t even feel controversial. I don’t think Dropbox made a mistake in cutting out their shared C++…

It was partly organizational imho. Oftentimes non mobile teams would write C++ modules. After writing the module, that team would refocus on server but the module would have remaining hard to find bugs (sometimes due to lack of mobile expertise) or could just use additional love and care. Sometimes these modules needing care and attention were even written by mobile specific teams. These were also due to insufficient organizational attention.

Re: The not so hidden cost of sharing code between iOS and Android

#239

Post by htormey » Thu, Aug 15, 2019, 12:32 PM UTC

dingle_thunk wrote: post #234

darthmajor wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Xamarin on paper seems like the holy Grail, but the fact that Microsoft itself chose to use react native instead of its own solution for Skype made it seem like I should not expect long term commitment to xamarin from MS.

The Skype engineering team is an acquisition with relative autonomy, and is always making weird choices. Wouldn't take that too seriously.

Microsoft Office has gone all in with React Native as well. Here is a recent comment from Andy Coates talking about MS Office Android performance:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20413046

Re: The not so hidden cost of sharing code between iOS and Android

#240

Post by commanderjroc » Thu, Aug 15, 2019, 12:33 PM UTC

I don't understand why someone at Dropbox's size and scale would go after C++ on mobile and blaze their own trail, when its probably more pragmatic to go native.

With that being said, I worked for a firm that extended the life of old ERP systems and we had to do a few mobile apps, we chose Xamarin because we were a shop of 7ish devs that had many projects to maintain and the cost of code sharing and familiarity with C# were our driving factors. It was a trade off most definitely but it was a pragmatic choice as well.

If you are capable of hiring more developers who know Java or Obj-C and can allow them to do only mobile development then its worth it to go native.

But, if you are a small company and know that Java,C# and Obj-C, C# developers are a little bit hard to find (depending on your developer market) then its probably more cost effective to go Xamarin or any other cross-platform code sharing model.

In the end its all about pragmatism.