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Building all of our new mobile apps using React Native

engineering.shopify.com

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

#31

Post by j2bax »

privateSFacct wrote: post #14
newfeatureok wrote: post #7

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.

Apple does some fairly beautiful responsive webpages... Albeit rather heavy! https://www.apple.com/apple-arcade/

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

#32

Post by newfeatureok »

ricketycricket wrote: post #26
newfeatureok wrote: post #7

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.

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

This is true, but there are a lot of features missing from a responsive site that apps have. Of course, I'd argue that all of the missing functionality can easily be added to Safari and Chrome (to name the big two mobile browsers).

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

#33

Post by lazyier »

newfeatureok wrote: post #7

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…

> Honestly I think the future of mobile will just be... mobile websites.

This.

Having to install software on my phone to use a service is cringy as hell and is a huge red flag for me. Like when trying to order food from a restaurant or shop somewhere.

It's almost always going to be a automatic no. I just don't trust them. They always want permissions to access things on my phone, which is just pure nonsense.

It's going to take a while for businesses to realize that in order to get a wide audience for the software they are paying for the last thing they want to do is force people to jump through hoops in order to use it.

For every one of 'google maps' there is going to be ten thousand other apps that simply have no benefit from being 'native'.

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

#35

Post by jayd16 »

privateSFacct wrote: post #14
newfeatureok wrote: post #7

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.

Whats the slack app written in?

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

#36

Post by malloreon »

secondo wrote: 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…

The second/third paragraphs of your comment could be find/replaced Shopify for Airbnb from 2-3 years ago and fit right in.

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

#37

Post by canistr »

"In order to best serve our retail merchants and learn about React Native in a physical retail setting, we decided to build out the new POS natively for iOS and use React Native for Android."

Unbelievable, really. The previous paragraph literally mentions the importance of performance.

facepalm

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

#38

Post by duxup »

rajasimon wrote: post #25
newfeatureok wrote: post #7

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.

I just wish with PWAs ... there was some more love as far as how they're handled.

Last time I looked at them it was really wonky to install a PWA from Chrome.

Developer advocacy at the time from Google was big on PWAs, but they were second class citizens everywhere in Google land....

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

#39

Post by harrisonjackson »

xyby wrote: 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?

There has been a large push to support web as a target in react-native by expo.

https://docs.expo.io/versions/latest/

Depending on the complexity of your app - expo is the best place to start with react-native. Their managed workflows allow you to write in 100% javascript w/ a lot of the native libraries already linked an exposed in JS. If you need something they haven't bundled already then you can eject and have a good starting point.

Expo web is still fairly new but they seem to have prioritized it as highly as support for Android and iOS.

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

#40

Post by yesimahuman »

xyby wrote: 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?

The Ionic team recently released React support so you can build a PWA using React and target iOS, Android, web, and electron. Uses Capacitor under the hood for full native access. It’s been getting a lot of usage since the release: https://ionicframework.com/blog/announcing-ionic-react/
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