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

361–370 of 588 posts

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

#361

Post by OzzyB »

Hates_ wrote: post #215
OzzyB wrote: post #157

Shopify should stick to making ecommerce sites and leave the mobile engineering evangelical space to those who's businesses are dependent on mobile and have the necessary experience. In short, the future isn't React Native, unless you have a time machine that will allow you to go back and rewrite it.

So even though they develop apps that have millions of downloads or that businesses rely on for their in-store point of sales, you don't consider Shopify qualified to speak on mobile development?

No, I don't consider an established tech company with "millions of downloads that businesses rely on" choosing a webstack devkit for their mobile development serious.

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

#362

Post by muxator »

globuous wrote: post #339
divbzero wrote: post #184

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…

[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...

The web post-wasm could be a whole different beast from what the web was originally supposed to be.

Not that the current situation is idyllic, but I fear a post-wasm web would be even more opaque and less inspectable.

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

#363

Post by anderspitman »

DevoAKA wrote: post #244
anderspitman wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You can use polling or sockets when the browser is open; the problem is showing those notifications on the phone's lock screen or when you're in another app.

Oh duh. And it sounds like iOS doesn't support that for PWAs yet?

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

#364

Post by hotgeart »

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…

Ads and Exposure.

Ads: Make a native app and a PWA, put a banner at the bottom. You'll get more from the native app.

Exposure: I made some stupid apps and without any SEO I get 10K-50K installs, you can't get that with a PWA and Google Search.

I'm 100% for PWA because I can't take anymore monopole shit from google play and his rules, but that's the reality.

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

#365

Post by pier25 »

scarface74 wrote: post #345
troquerre wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

That’s not true. Back in 2007, Adobe claimed that they could get Flash working on the original iPhone if Apple had allowed them. When they finally got it to run on Android years later, it required a 1Ghz processor and 1GB of RAM and it still barely ran and was horrible on battery life. The original iPhone had 128Mb of RAM and a 400Mhz processor. It wasn’t until around 2011 when there was an iPhone that met those spec…

This.

I developed a number of Air mobile apps back in 2012-2014 and all the blame is on Adobe. Flash was extremely inefficient and Adobe didn't want to invest the necessary resources to properly bring it to the mobile world.

Adobe cancelled AS4 (aka Flash Next) which would have made Air a very competitive crossplatform solution. They shifted all its resources into HTML5 to throw a bone to the Flash community and it was a complete failure.

https://insights.stackoverflow.com/trends?tags=actionscript-...

Don't get me wrong, it probably made economical sense for Adobe but it was a shame.

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

#366

Post by dessant »

scarface74 wrote: post #329
bostik wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A good part of it is their absolutely massive 30% cut. The only reason they get away with it is that when Apple's app store first came out, most of the online casual applications were games. Hosted by a few gargantuan aggregators ( cough newgrounds cough ) who charged 70%+ of the revenue for their ... service. Against a backdrop of above-criminal-rates extortion, 30% must have looked like a bargain. To put these numb…

Most of the money being made on the App Store is for in app consumables from pay to win games. You’ll have to forgive me for not shedding a tear for them. I hope Apple Arcade takes a huge chunk of their revenue. It’s not indy developers trying to make a living. The other types of apps that use to make Apple a lot of money are streaming services. But most of those are now not allowing you to do in app purchases. I’m l…

Though we should shed some tears for those who just try to sell their apps and make a living, after already being ripped off for expensive equipment and an annual developer account fee.

If Apple would care, it would be possible to charge a smaller commission based on the app category, and to vaive annual developer account fees for verified open source developers.

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

#367

Post by sibeliuss »

Despegar wrote: post #198
ppeetteerr wrote: post #197

I'm surprised no one is mentioning this: "At the beginning of 2019, we did a 6-week experiment on our flagship Point of Sale (POS) app to see if it would be a good candidate for a rewrite in React Native. We learned a lot, including that our retail merchants expect almost 2x the responsiveness in our POS due to the muscle memory of using our app while also talking to customers. In order to best serve our retail merch…

That really just says it all doesn't it? It's basically an admission that the use of cross-platform frameworks is worse for customers/users, but they're going to ignore that to optimize for their own software engineering org.

Build RN app on Android, if it's successful then do a light port to iOS and decommission native team.

Seems like a fantastic experiment IMO.

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

#368

Post by dnh44 »

scarface74 wrote: post #345
troquerre wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

That’s not true. Back in 2007, Adobe claimed that they could get Flash working on the original iPhone if Apple had allowed them. When they finally got it to run on Android years later, it required a 1Ghz processor and 1GB of RAM and it still barely ran and was horrible on battery life. The original iPhone had 128Mb of RAM and a 400Mhz processor. It wasn’t until around 2011 when there was an iPhone that met those spec…

Also flash player on the Mac was terrible and consumed a lot of energy. I’m not surprised Apple didn’t want it on iOS.

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

#369

Post by bsaul »

scarface74 wrote: post #329
bostik wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A good part of it is their absolutely massive 30% cut. The only reason they get away with it is that when Apple's app store first came out, most of the online casual applications were games. Hosted by a few gargantuan aggregators ( cough newgrounds cough ) who charged 70%+ of the revenue for their ... service. Against a backdrop of above-criminal-rates extortion, 30% must have looked like a bargain. To put these numb…

Most of the money being made on the App Store is for in app consumables from pay to win games. You’ll have to forgive me for not shedding a tear for them. I hope Apple Arcade takes a huge chunk of their revenue. It’s not indy developers trying to make a living. The other types of apps that use to make Apple a lot of money are streaming services. But most of those are now not allowing you to do in app purchases. I’m l…

As a developer of a pro app in a niche market trying to make a living on the app store, i can tell you those 30% are what prevents me from working full time on my app.

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

#370

Post by LeoNatan25 »

liampronan wrote: post #305
LeoNatan25 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without synchronous view layout, it's not really possible to have a truly recycling view without many warts. We've (Wix) been hacking at this for years, and it's not possible. You either block the UI or view flash for the user if fast enough scrolling is performed. Facebook engineering promised synchronous layout will come at some point, which will open the door to that.

Is Wix moving away from React Native at this point?

No
Post reply on HN