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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

#231

Post by stefano »

hopia wrote: post #189
Androider wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be pants-on-head insane for a company like Shopify to go all-in on Flutter. Is Flutter going to be around 10 years from now? Can Shopify support Flutter on their own if nobody else is using it 10 years from now? I don't mean that technically the license would allow them to, but can they in practice field the manpower and skills to do so across all the platforms they need.

I don't see how it's any crazier than publicly declaring React Native as their future like this.

With React Native, you're betting on a framework. With Flutter, you're betting on both a framework and a new language. Flutter also works on a much lower level than RN, which means it would be harder for them to pick up the development if the need should arise.

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

#232

Post by anon9001 »

tilolebo wrote: post #176
freehunter wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what I don't understand when people criticize frameworks like React Native... "I didn't like that I had to build 15% of the app in native code, so I ditched RN and now have to write 100% of the app in native code, but twice and in two different languages"?

React Native isn't the only abstraction out there. You could use Flutter, Ionic or similar. Or do they have the same issue?

They all have the same issues, but RN has the largest community.

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

#233

Post by wvenable »

Androider wrote: post #223
wvenable wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, many large companies seek technological solutions to political problems. I've worked for dysfunctional organizations; they want technology to provide the decisions bottom-up because, for whatever reason, nobody wants to make any hard calls. These projects fail because you simply can't have success that way. If this is a political and organizational problem, then this choice of technology is entirely not about th…

I wouldn't class this as political problems. Is Facebook having a gazillion developers on their app a political problem, or necessary given what they want it to do? How is replicating that for each platform a good solution, in any sense (political or technical)? Tech companies core competencies are the service or product that they provide. Making it N times for N platforms is a hurdle that doesn't improve on the core…

> Is Facebook having a gazillion developers on their app a political problem, or necessary given what they want it to do?

Yes. How is it not a political problem? It's not a technological one.

> How is replicating that for each platform a good solution, in any sense (political or technical)?

It doesn't change anything politically but technologically platform abstractions are never 100%. You always need an expert for each platform anyway and by targeting the abstraction rather than the platform you're just targeting a crappier experience for your end users and often your developers as well. React Native is not without it's issues.

So what's the benefit? You're not saving expertise. Even sharing code isn't that important -- once decisions have been made, features planned out in detail, server APIs created, the actual platform specific code is a pretty small part overall. You still have to test on each platform individually. Fix platform specific bugs even in non-platform specific code. And you're not creating a dependency on a 3rd party that you don't control.

> How is developers re-implementing every UI screen and feature across iOS and Android helping Shopify customers sell more merch?

How is it not? I mean the argument here is that there is a huge savings to justify the risk but I don't think that's true.

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

#234

Post by anderspitman »

phreack wrote: post #70
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…

It can't be overstated how many apps are absolutely dependent on working push notifications (all chat for example) and can't be replicated as websites. And that's not yet implemented for iOS so we're all at Apple's mercy until it is, which may never be.

Honest question: is there some reason you can't use standard web tech for push notifications? ie polling, WebSockets, etc?

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

#235

Post by wvenable »

Androider wrote: post #227
wvenable wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Because they have massive platform specific teams, and they would like not to. I'm somewhat shocked at the size of some of the mobile app development teams at some of these companies. There's no way they need that many developers. What are 100's of developers doing on a single app for a single platform? How is there enough work for that many people? The overhead must be unbelievable. I can't imagine that adding a p…

The Facebook app is like Microsoft Word. Everyone only uses 20%, but it's a different 20% for each. The app is a hojillion megabytes, and serves literally billions of users. There's features in there that addresses some specific niche in Africa for "only" 50 million users, that some sub-team of a sub-team is tasked with maintaining.

Microsoft doesn't use an abstraction to create Word for Mac OS. They have shared code, yes. But they are different products with different user interfaces to match their respective platforms. I'm not sure why mobile is so different that one needs a platform abstraction if you've already got a bazillion developers working on the product.

Of course, Facebook does benefit by owning that abstraction making it exactly what they need. For everyone else, the risk is a bit different.

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

#236

Post by BharathMG12 »

We did multiple experiments on server driven UI for our mobile apps.

1) Using native app - Sending layouts in JSON and using Flipkart Proteus library in Android to render them. This only enables appearance changes and not behaviors. So we really didn't server driven LOGIC.

2) Using Flutter - Wrote the wrappers for Flutter widgets. Those wrappers basically just converts JSON to Flutter widgets at run time. And also enabled actions to be server driven. The complete app was made server driven using this approach. The only problem is, too much of abstraction in the client made the code base very messy and hard to reason.

3) Using React native - The biggest selling point for using react native is, codepush feature. We didn't have to write dumb client wrappers which expects JSON from server. We can just write normal JS code and deliver it to client devices without making app update. This enables really rapid experimentation for product features. We are currently developing this.

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

#237

Post by ryandrake »

otaviokz wrote: post #182
wpietri wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly, this sort of public PR campaign is surely related to an internal PR campaign. Often followed by a declaration of Totally Amazing Success, shortly after which the person who led the campaign will use the victory to move to a higher position, possibly at a new company.

Saw it happening a few times in my 12 year of industry. I suppose it's specifically common in companies that use social media (and other media) presence as a recruitment boosting tool. Twice the "leader" of the "Totally Amazing Success" left the company to "be totally amazing" somewhere else. In both cases the team was made mostly of very young engineers, the level of amazingness was strongly overestimated. It was al…

RDD: Resume-Driven Development

You often see this kind of stack rank of developer priorities:

1. What’s good for my career

2. What makes my boss look good

3. What is convenient for the development team

4. What is good for the company

...

99. What’s good for users

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

#238

Post by [deleted] »

pennaMan wrote: post #146
phreack wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It can't be overstated how many apps are absolutely dependent on working push notifications (all chat for example) and can't be replicated as websites. And that's not yet implemented for iOS so we're all at Apple's mercy until it is, which may never be.

Apple will never give in and implement webpush on mobile safari because that would affect their precious app store. How will they extort developers then? That's also the reason mobile safari is so limited in other features.

[deleted]

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

#239

Post by yagodragon »

The web and its ecosystem are huge. The browser is essentially the new OS and no matter how complex and quirky js, react and the rest of the tools are, we're gonna stick with them for a long time. Big technological advances like PWA's, WASM and rendering engines like servo and webrender are only gonna shorten the gap between native and web UI experiences. Look at what happened to the desktop. Native UI development became a niche and even apps like photoshop are now just websites(figma) or electron apps. This is eventually gonna happen to mobile development as well. There will be no need to create native apps for most cases and no need to use those centralized app stores to "install" apps on your device.

That being said the web is not quite there yet and that's why solutions like react-native and flutter exist. I don't believe that react-native is the future. Many people have explained in great detail why the idea and the execution behind RN are just flawed and why it makes development hard and complex. Heck, it doesn't even eliminate the need for native developers. React-native is just a transitional tech we'll use until the web and PWA's become good enough for 95% of the cases. The future of RN is the Web.

On the other hand, flutter and dart seem to solve all of the problems we have with UI development. It's an amazing tech that combines all the best ideas from QT, flash, java swing, delphi and react-redux in one project that is completely free and open source. It's what we've always dreamed existed in the UI world. The development experience is great and designers seem to love it as well. Despite its advantages, flutter is still a huge bet and i can't see a world where everybody writes in Dart.

If I had to make a guess, I'm still betting on the web in the long run and hope flutter captures a small market share among frustrated mobile/web devs and designers. I just can't see react-native anywhere in between.

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

#240

Post by neurostimulant »

wdb wrote: post #113
anon9001 wrote: post #76

Shopify is right to use React Native. I build an app with React Native Web and we produce Android/iOS/web from the same code base with 3 developers. No, it's not perfect. Yes, JS can be awkward and confusing. Yes, a truly native app built by expert platform-specific developers would be better. But I'm able to ship this product with less than half the team size I would need for native development. JavaScript developer…

Don't know last time I tried React Native and wanted to use some cool feature of iOS. I either had to write my own RN plugin in Swift/ObjC or wait for someone else to do it.

It's actually not too bad. You don't even have to put those native code as a separate plugin. You can simply add the native code directly to the generated ios/android project like you do a native app.
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