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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

#371

Post by pier25 »

ridiculous_fish wrote: post #303
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…

Native controls can afford to be richer (in principal) because knowledge transfers across apps. Websites do not enable such transfer: there's too much of a culture of customizing everything. On mobile the problem is somewhat less noticeable because rich native interaction models haven't really emerged.

Good point.

In the mobile and desktop world devs are totally fine with using native GUIs that ship with the OS (even encouraged to do so) but in the web world projects are criticized for using libraries like Bootstrap and devs and designers are expected to reinvent the wheel every time. Also don't use a native alert or you will condemned to hell.

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

#372

Post by grawprog »

tombert wrote: post #296
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…

Forgive me a bit, since I haven't been on Newgrounds since before the iPhone came out, but did Newgrounds ever charge to host on their site? Did they allow you to monetize your games?

https://www.newgrounds.com/wiki/creator-resources/monetizati...

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

#373

Post by pier25 »

dnh44 wrote: post #368
scarface74 wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Truth is even if Apple had wanted to bring it to iOS it didn't really have a choice. Users would have blamed Apple for the low battery time.

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

#374

Post by jakub_g »

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…

Monetization. Native apps provide app & in-app purchases seamlessly integrated in the platform. Web payment solutions are clumsy in comparison. Sure, there are new APIs that ask for CC number, holder etc. to be prefilled but the friction is still not at the same level IMO.

You need to pay the cut to Apple/Google but in certain scenarios it's preferable than asking for payment details.

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

#375

Post by pier25 »

cletus wrote: post #43
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…

Apps are dominant on web because, well, the web sucks. We can gloss over this on desktop because of raw processing power but still, layout if html is just plain terrible. Of course mobile processors will continue to improve but on mobile you’re making a trade off between performance and battery life and battery life will probably never be not a concern.

The mobile web sucks because of ads and bloated websites not because some inherent technological flaw.

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

#376

Post by troquerre »

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…

Supporting all of Apple's functionality was one of the reasons for not supporting Flash that Steve shared in his post, but I think you're right that Adobe not being able to get Flash working on iPhone was the main reason. Thanks for the correction!

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

#377

Post by dmitriid »

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 has come a long way since, and in five years to a decade could be competitive.

The web is always 5 to 10 years away from being competitive.

Meanwhile Twitter struggled to implement such a trivial thing as a virtual list on the web: https://grumpy.website/post/0RQvmdNmN

It took them almost a year after the resign to fix most of these issues. While breaking or half-breaking functionality for almost everything else.

And that's for a website that's nothing but text and pictures. I wouldn't he my breath waiting for web to be competitive.

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

#378

Post by ENGNR »

JamesSwift wrote: post #352
ENGNR wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

If I’m reading it right that’s for if you control the app though. They still lose login if they follow a link from a mail client or slack app over to a mobile web app, which wouldn’t happen if they were going to an actual app

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

#379

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…

> Honestly I think the future of mobile will just be... mobile websites.

Indeed.

A lot of people still think that native is superior than web but the problem is that most websites are bloated pieces of crap.

If anyone doubts this check the Missive email client on iOS which was even featured by Apple on the AppStore and runs on Cordova:

https://medium.com/missive-app/our-dirty-little-secret-cross...

(sorry for the Medium link)

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

#380

Post by dmitriid »

pjmlp wrote: post #301
yummybear wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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”.

Arcane knowledge? That is pretty basic stuff for anyone doing Web since the HTML 3 days. Have you ever done native Android, including using the NDK? It is full of arcane knowledge, scattered about commit comments, medium, G+ and Twitter posts from Android team instead of being on developer.android.com, APIs introduced in one IO are deprecated/replaced by the next IO, OEMs (cough Samsung) that change AOSP behaviours,.…

Yes. Web is full of arcane knowledge. Take virtual lists for example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22186827
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