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Building all of our new mobile apps using React Native

engineering.shopify.com

21–30 of 588 posts

Re: Building all of our new mobile apps using React Native

#21
post #12

Is there a reason that the web is not a target of react native? It seems somewhat insane to have a cross platform approach and leave out the biggest platform of all, the web. Or - looking at it the other way round - what approaches are there to take a working pwa website and turn it into an app? What advantages over such an approach can react native bring to the table?

It is, and it's even mentioned and linked to in the article.

Re: Building all of our new mobile apps using React Native

#22
post #2

the example react native code they give in this image would error out: https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0779/4361/files/ReactJSvsR... Text has to be in a

You cannot see the imports. import {Text as View} from 'react-native'; All good!

this is truly evil

Re: Building all of our new mobile apps using React Native

#23
post #9

And in a couple of years, "Why we are moving away from React Native at Shopify". Not slamming React Native but the sensationalistic headline. Anyone with a bit of experience in software should know better than making this kind of silly proclamation about the future of your software stack.

Man first thing I thought of. Seems like if you try to proclaim the future you end up eating your words

My first thought was the Airbnb article "React Native at Airbnb" https://medium.com/airbnb-engineering/react-native-at-airbnb...

Re: Building all of our new mobile apps using React Native

#24

Honestly I think the future of mobile will just be... mobile websites. What's missing until regular websites have parity with mobile apps in functionality? - Accelerometer and all sensor support (some of these are already supported on various browsers on various OSes) - Background support - Bluetooth - WiFi - Better notifications - etc. Sure there will always be a need for native, but 99% of apps don't need any of th…

Look at your most used apps - none of them are "responsive pages". That should tell you something. Folks who have tried responsive pages haven't done that well. I am curious - what is the most popular responsive webpage on iphone would people say? I'd like to check out the current leader in this space.

None of my most used apps are responsive pages because Safari neuters the functionality.

- White Noise -> Safari can't play background sounds once closed.

- Messenger -> Notification trouble, not to mention Facebook won't let you use the mobile version of Messenger without a lot of effort.

- Google Maps -> Close, but a lot of the functionality, like reminders require notifications which isn't up-to-par with just Safari

- Teams -> See messenger.

Re: Building all of our new mobile apps using React Native

#25

Honestly I think the future of mobile will just be... mobile websites. What's missing until regular websites have parity with mobile apps in functionality? - Accelerometer and all sensor support (some of these are already supported on various browsers on various OSes) - Background support - Bluetooth - WiFi - Better notifications - etc. Sure there will always be a need for native, but 99% of apps don't need any of th…

I thought this too. You know recent TWA with PWA makes the website accessible with anything on the system level. Like the location and other information.

Re: Building all of our new mobile apps using React Native

#26

Honestly I think the future of mobile will just be... mobile websites. What's missing until regular websites have parity with mobile apps in functionality? - Accelerometer and all sensor support (some of these are already supported on various browsers on various OSes) - Background support - Bluetooth - WiFi - Better notifications - etc. Sure there will always be a need for native, but 99% of apps don't need any of th…

> What's missing until regular websites have parity with mobile apps in functionality?

The desire to build web apps instead of mobile apps.

> Literally all of them could be implemented as responsive pages with acceptable performance.

Exactly. It's not a technical issue as much as an issue of focus/interest. Unfortunately, this has been a losing battle since 2008.

Re: Building all of our new mobile apps using React Native

#27

Honestly I think the future of mobile will just be... mobile websites. What's missing until regular websites have parity with mobile apps in functionality? - Accelerometer and all sensor support (some of these are already supported on various browsers on various OSes) - Background support - Bluetooth - WiFi - Better notifications - etc. Sure there will always be a need for native, but 99% of apps don't need any of th…

I feel quite the opposite, most of the phone apps will likely to be thick client variants of the web apps, given that the hosts have so much power and storage available. Privacy concerns are gonna force this model where almost every activity having minimal network overhead. We are going back to the desktop app era, is what I feel.

Re: Building all of our new mobile apps using React Native

#28
post #2

the example react native code they give in this image would error out: https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0779/4361/files/ReactJSvsR... Text has to be in a

It seems they fixed it!

https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0779/4361/files/React_Nati...

Re: Building all of our new mobile apps using React Native

#29
post #10

Arguably the biggest concern with React Native is that it is controlled by a single entity, Facebook, and that they are not one of the leading mobile platforms who from a business perspective have strong incentives to ensure the future of their respective app eco systems. Facebook's incentives with React Native are somewhat unclear. This is a big, yet often unspoken, reason companies are vary of depending on React Na…

>>> Facebook's incentives with React Native are somewhat unclear

I always figured this conversation happened:

1: "We have all these engineers who write javascript but users are switching to native apps. what do we do?"

2: "We could retrain them all."

1: "That would be expensive and time consuming."

2: "We could fire them all."

1: "Also expensive and time consuming."

2: "Wait, what if we made it so you could write native apps in javascript?"

Re: Building all of our new mobile apps using React Native

#30

Honestly I think the future of mobile will just be... mobile websites. What's missing until regular websites have parity with mobile apps in functionality? - Accelerometer and all sensor support (some of these are already supported on various browsers on various OSes) - Background support - Bluetooth - WiFi - Better notifications - etc. Sure there will always be a need for native, but 99% of apps don't need any of th…

No mobile website has match the performance of native though
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