Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Building all of our new mobile apps using React Native

engineering.shopify.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

351–360 of 588 posts

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

#351

Post by pier25 »

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…

Another feature lacking in the mobile web are touch gestures.

I'm facing this problem right now and the best option for recognizing gestures seems to be HammerJS which adds 7.5kB gzipped to your app.

After that your app still needs to react kinetically (eg: the image moves while dragging it to the left and then the view transitions to the next image). It's a lot of code that needs to be shipped in the JS bundle.

BTW if you have a better solution than HammerJS please comment here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22184079

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

#352

Post by JamesSwift »

ENGNR wrote: post #313
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 biggest feature I'd like parity on for mobile web.... is logins. As the tracking war rages, humble little login cookies are becoming a casualty. For example if someone gets a transactional email (say a new booking notification), opens it on their iphone, it opens safari.... in a new context. No login! So frustrating for them. You can send tokens with the links, but they really need to have an expiry date on them,…

Theres native platform support for that now with shared login context between browsers and apps.

e.g. https://developer.apple.com/documentation/authenticationserv...

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

#353

Post by awinter-py »

tannedNerd wrote: post #283
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.

installing the right version of xcode & getting required libraries -- my experience may have been particularly bad because of the ios 13 / swift 5.1 release, but the fact that these tool versions are linked to the xcode version is the root cause here

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

#354

Post by joshgachnang »

Normal_gaussian wrote: post #249
beefield wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

Simply, it doesn't affect me adversely at all. I think you have a misunderstanding as to how many notifications are generated. Today I received: * 3 reminders to eat * 1 security alert (delivery) * about two dozen instant messages between myself and clients * a couple of dozen CI alerts * 3 emails Its easy to have different levels of notifications, and filter message channels. I have less distraction now than I had i…

What kind of reminders to eat are you getting? Like "don't forget to eat?" or "don't forget, this is your plan for lunch"?

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

#355

Post by JamesSwift »

TheAdamAndChe wrote: post #348
JamesSwift wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Messenger, Mail, and Teams would be absolutely crippled without background support and notifications. Maps would be somewhat viable, and I'm not familiar with White Noise. Also, 'native parity' is a moving goalpost. At the point you get support for all those things across all platforms, what else has been added to native that you are now missing? This isn't even considering the fact that there is no incentive for app…

Progressive web apps can already receive notifications.

iOS supports push notifications in a PWA context? Thats news to me.

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

#356

Post by nilkn »

Touche wrote: post #267
nilkn wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that not a tremendous optimization for the team? It probably cuts the team size in half (or, seen another way, doubles its size for free), and it unifies of a lot of the mobile and web stacks behind similar languages and tools, which in turn would allow some unification in the hiring and recruiting pipelines.

It's an optimization they aren't using, React Native is only being used for Android.

Do they not clearly intend to use it for both in the future? They didn't go back and rewrite all existing apps, and they did an experiment with Android to validate the approach.

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

#357

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

I used to be a cross-platform framework skeptic (Disclaimer: I have written a LOT of cross-platform, low-level code over my career).

I am less of a skeptic, nowadays. I think that it makes good business sense for most connected apps. Also, the quality and stability of the frameworks has increased.

It really stinks to spend two years training your team on a framework, only to have said framework suddenly float to the top of the tank, belly-up. React seems to have settled in for a long stay. It's kicked its shoes off, and grabbed the remote.

That said, it won't affect me. I tend to write stuff that controls devices, so my code needs to be pretty "bare bones" native.

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

#358

Post by jdmg94 »

hugey010 wrote: post #101

I thought the cool thing to do was declare React Native dead for your org, not the new hotness?!? I try to re-evaluate my opinion of the mobile ecosystem monthly, and would love to know how people agree / disagree with my rankings: 1. Just make a web page 2. Native iOS & Android 3. Flutter 4. Some ordering of remaining cross-platform tools depending on requirements. (React Native, Vue Native, Xamarin, Ionic, Titanium…

who is using flutter for their product? something in the wild (production) that has a real user base?

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

#359

Post by jdmg94 »

jamil7 wrote: post #252
pjmlp wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a different order: 1. Just make a web page (specially since many apps are just pretty CRUD ones) 1.1 For certain devices WebGL/WebAssembly can eventually also be an option 2. Native iOS & Android 3. Native iOS & Android with server side driven code for the business logic (maybe even UI layouts) 4. Native iOS & Android for the views with C++ for business logic 5. Your point .4 regarding cross-platform tools I d…

Apollo Server and it's associated iOS and Android clients can make your 3rd option really easy to pull off as it generates your CRUD logic and model code.

if only they could figure out their caching...

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

#360

Post by hopia »

k__ wrote: post #222
hopia wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The last time I was using React Native even text input was broken on Android. It made any app using it basically unusable. Android profiler didn't work either, opening it crashed the runtime. Flutter has its bugs but they're certainly not that fundamental issues.

Sounds like the opposite to me. A bug in React Native and fundamental issues in Flutter.

I don't follow. What I outlined were fundamental issues with RN, not with Flutter.
Post reply on HN