Building all of our new mobile apps using React Native • Hacker News Board

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

#281

Post by GrumpyNl » Wed, Jan 29, 2020, 8:46 PM UTC

divbzero wrote: post #184

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…

Ten years ago Facebook fought this battle and lost. [1] [2] [3] [1]: https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/using-ht... "Using HTML5 Today" [2]: https://appleinsider.com/articles/12/09/11/facebook_admits_h... "Facebook admits HTML5 not competitive with Cocoa Touch" [3]: https://techcrunch.com/2012/12/13/facebook-android-faster/ "Facebook Speeds Up Android App By Ditching HTML5 And Rebuilding It Natively…

Why does everybody think they have to build at the scale of Fb. Most of the apps will do perfectly fine when they are web based.

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

#282

Post by troquerre » Wed, Jan 29, 2020, 8:48 PM UTC

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…

The power of websites is that they run cross-platform. If your website works on chrome on windows it’ll work (for the most part) on Firefox on Mac and safari on iOS. Apple is against this philosophically because it doesn’t take advantage of the unique capabilities their devices provide. It’s the same reason why Apple stopped supporting flash https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/

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

#283

Post by tannedNerd » Wed, Jan 29, 2020, 8:48 PM UTC

awinter-py wrote: post #192

low quality of tooling in mobile has been a reality forever and the vendors are not only unwilling to change, they've doubled down on poo-flavored buildsystems that are impossible for the community to fix this stuff is life or death, and also impossible without giving up on native: > React Native on both iOS and Android and shares 95% of the same code > less crashes on iOS than our native iOS app > an Android version…

"(impossible on native because of the multi-day process required to build an ios app for the first time)"

What??? how is it multiple days to build an app for the first time? It takes minutes and if you are being pedantic by including App Store review it tends to be under 24 hours for new apps and under 6 hours for app updates now. Plus you can distribute to your own team instantly through TestFlight.

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

#284

Post by yummybear » Wed, Jan 29, 2020, 8:50 PM UTC

pjmlp wrote: post #81

_hl_ wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What's missing until regular websites have parity with mobile apps in functionality? Performance. But we're beginning to approach performance parity - not by the web becoming an faster, mind you, but by apps becoming slower. It used to be only cheap/poor-quality apps that felt like glorified web pages, but now even many high-profile apps are just parts of a web stack embedded into an app.

It depends pretty much on what the app is all about. CRUD mobile apps can be made pretty fast when not doing an SPA bigger than Quake just for displaying text. SSR, pure CSS3, caching, server workers, mobile first, can go a long way. Naturally there are other kind of apps where native wins hands down, e.g. WebGL vs GL ES 3.2/Vulkan/Metal/DX.

It certainly possible, but there is a lot of arcane knowledge that goes in to the techniques listed. Native apps, generally, has better performance “built in”.

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

#285

Post by protonfish » Wed, Jan 29, 2020, 8:56 PM UTC

divbzero wrote: post #184

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…

Ten years ago Facebook fought this battle and lost. [1] [2] [3] [1]: https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/using-ht... "Using HTML5 Today" [2]: https://appleinsider.com/articles/12/09/11/facebook_admits_h... "Facebook admits HTML5 not competitive with Cocoa Touch" [3]: https://techcrunch.com/2012/12/13/facebook-android-faster/ "Facebook Speeds Up Android App By Ditching HTML5 And Rebuilding It Natively…

It makes sense that a company with a business model based on mining and selling personal data would not find mobile web to be acceptable - too many privacy and security protections that can be eschewed on native. For the same reasons, consumers should choose HTML.

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

#286

Post by AgloeDreams » Wed, Jan 29, 2020, 8:56 PM UTC

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…

> acceptable performance

Until your competitor shows up. I think you are honestly right for the most cases, but the expectation on mobile, (esp. since the OS is written in native and 120Hz screens are coming) is so freaking high. The touch response rate expected is just going to make hybrid and web apps just seem like trash to the average consumer when compared directly with native apps. They just don't do it and just don't feel right.

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

#287

Post by AgloeDreams » Wed, Jan 29, 2020, 8:59 PM UTC

wpietri wrote: post #110

privateSFacct wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I haven't tried it on iOS, but Twitter's web app is quite good on Android/Firefox and Android/Chrome. Not quite as good as native, and prone to developing lag if I don't occasionally restart the browser. But surprisingly good. They talk about the process of building it here: https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/open-sourc...

I tried it, it's pretty close honestly, but the performance just feels off and it does weird stuff all the time. The iOS app is just better.

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

#288

Post by john_alan » Wed, Jan 29, 2020, 9:01 PM UTC

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…

non-native never feels the same. fuck web apps.

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

#289

Post by Steltek » Wed, Jan 29, 2020, 9:02 PM UTC

divbzero wrote: post #184

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…

Ten years ago Facebook fought this battle and lost. [1] [2] [3] [1]: https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/using-ht... "Using HTML5 Today" [2]: https://appleinsider.com/articles/12/09/11/facebook_admits_h... "Facebook admits HTML5 not competitive with Cocoa Touch" [3]: https://techcrunch.com/2012/12/13/facebook-android-faster/ "Facebook Speeds Up Android App By Ditching HTML5 And Rebuilding It Natively…

Didn't Facebook also want native app access so they could work around OS limits like background processing via shady stuff like leaving the microphone on? I prefer webapps for security reasons because of Facebook's checkered history with native apps.

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

#290

Post by agumonkey » Wed, Jan 29, 2020, 9:02 PM UTC

apl002 wrote: post #205

jammygit wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can’t stand push notifications, I disable them all except for a couple (like signal). They are usually only part of the app to manipulate you into using it constantly

I love push notifications. Its honestly how I stay up to date on whatever is happening. I aint got time to scroll through everything

are you the one exception that makes us all suffer from notification induced FOMO ? :)