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Building all of our new mobile apps using React Native

engineering.shopify.com

331–340 of 588 posts

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

#331
This is an interesting read and may be the full story, and a completely justified strategy.

But at the risk of sounding cynical, I'd be interested in any political motivations - if he's a new VP, it wouldn't have been unheard of for unnecessary swashbuckling Transformation Projects to be kicked off under the new regime for no obvious reason.

Complete conjecture, I have no inside knowledge, just have seen this happen time and time again.

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

#332

> The first is a tooling team that helps with engineering setup, integration and deployment. The second is a foundations team that focuses on SDKs, code reuse and open source. They have a whole team to set up tooling for React Native. I wasted many days trying to do this work on my own. They also have a whole team for evaluating 3rd-party libraries that provide functionality missing from React Native, such as letting…

How has flutter compared?

I am satisfied with Flutter. My app is almost ready for beta testing:

https://www.cozydate.com

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

#333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

several applications require them to be useful. Security events from my home cameras, messages from clients, timers, email Anytime I'm using a peice of small business software I'd probably like it to be able to give me notifications

Honestly curious and hopefully not rude, but how can you concentrate on anything? Or does your work/life not require you to concentrate ever/most of the time on anything? (I have turned all but phone call and sms notifications off on my phone. I will check my email/whatsapp when I want and see notifications there as needed. If someone has something urgent, they know how to call.)

Not grandparent but for me:

1) only certain notifications that are important have unique sound, vibrate, etc.

2) other semi important notifications flash. Light is not that bright to notice.

3) other notifications have numbers on app so there are some despite not seeing any notifications.

Result: I stopped checking every hour. It's actually been an improvement for me to stay away from phone.

I noticed that some apps abuse you for disabling notifications and Viber is biggest example. I don't care about holiday wishes or viber news but I need app to stay in touch with some people. Sadly, I only check at most once a fortnight because of this disabled notification nagging.

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

#334

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…

> they don't need to know any objc/swift/java/kotlin to build the product. I have a hard time believing this, and I've been making apps on both platforms for >10 years. And I love react-native. My latest day job is basically forking popular react-native packages, often rewriting them in Swift, fixing numerous bugs, and adding features specific for our company. And all this experience has taught me that in no way can…

> And all this experience has taught me that in no way can you expect anything but the most basic, ugly CRUD app from a JS dev.

> I've been making apps on both platforms for >10 years. And I love react-native

Doesn't this make you a JS dev too? Or how exactly do you define JS dev?

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

#335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 strikes me that, more than anything, it is the lack of an efficient "Add to Home Screen" flow, that has doomed mobile websites. ...and it's intentional. By having an app store, mobile OS distributors know that they have control over a massive revenue stream.

Oh, 100%!

It is absolutely intentional that iOS Safari on iPhones does not have support for fullscreen api, for example, whereas both WatchOS (somewhat) and iPadOS do. Apple is quite anti-competitive when it comes to letting web apps utilize the full potential of modern web standards.

And they often use "industry advocates" driven psy-op tactics to manoeuvre public opinion such as the following:

[1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/49589861/is-there-a-non-...

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

#336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But what happens if Apple or Google gives web apps more of the capabilities of native apps?

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

#337
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.

You mean extort developers who are mostly publishing free apps backed by services or advertising?

How many apps do you use on a daily basis that you paid money for, find notifications useful, and would have been suitable as a web app?

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

#338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How has flutter compared?

Not OP, but I've tried all of the big SPA frameworks (not specifically react native though) and I decided to use flutter for a non-trivial side project and I don't ever want to touch the big SPA frameworks ever again. Flutter is also fast, pretty lightweight, and good on battery. It feels native on iOS and Android. I have little Android development experience (side project years ago) and no iOS experience. It's easy…

I'm considering using Flutter (instead of Ionic which Ive been using for mobile up till now).

In terms of Node breaking when switch platforms - are you syncing the node_modules folder between machines somehow? Don't do that. Doing "npm install" will sometimes install binaries specific to a platform that won't work across them. Put node_modules in your.gitignore, and sync between machines using version control rather than something like Dropbox. I used to just put the whole project in Dropbox but ran into too any issues between Mac/Windows.

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

#339

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…

[2] is from 2012 though, almost a decade ago. The web has come a long way since, and in five years to a decade could be competitive. With wasm and webgpu and what not. And as of today, i dont think the mobile web interfaces for fb and messenger are particularly worse than their native counterparts. They save me the notifications actually...

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

#340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In re: distribution challenge, PWAs can already be published to the Google Play store.

Yeah, and those are called TWAs-as in Trusted Web Activities. As much as I dislike Google in general, they have been good at bringing web development and native apps closer than ever.
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