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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

#411

Post by scarface74 »

bsaul wrote: post #369
scarface74 wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If your app was such a great one, you couldn’t convince your customers to pay enough to make up the difference?

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

#412

Post by sflicht »

phreack wrote: post #70
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…

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.

Even if you think your app depends on push notifications, your customers don't necessarily want them. I would bet that in 98% of the cases you have in mind, I would be perfectly happy to use the functionality without push notifications. (For example, "all chat". Even if your app is capable of chatting with me, I doubt I actually want it to.)

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

#413

Post by criddell »

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.

Performance is about a lot more than speed. I want low battery, CPU, data, and memory usage. That's a lot harder to do in a web app.

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

#414

Post by criddell »

Fr0styMatt88 wrote: post #395
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…

I really like the idea of PWAs, but I've tried a few of them and I always come away being annoyed at the app launch latency. They still feel like they're hitting a remote server when starting up for.... something? My uneducated hunch is that they're over-zealously checking their server for updates. The other issue I have with their implementation is the opaqueness of how offline caching works. How much space do apps…

Developers love the idea of PWAs. Users are less enthusiastic.

I for one personally like that Apple does some rudimentary vetting of apps in their store. I really have no interest in running a web app that could be great today and loaded with malware and trackers tomorrow.

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

#415

Post by doctor_eval »

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…

Ten years ago, Facebook tried with HTML5 -- and 10 years before that Java tried with Swing and then JavaFX. There has always been this push for a "write once, run anywhere" application development platform - long before it was the mantra of Java in the late 90's, or QT a bit later, or React today.

The truth is that the platforms change faster than the cross-platform tools. Swing lost out not because it was horrible to work with, but because they couldn't track changes to the platform fast enough; Swing apps looked dated from the very start. I'm pretty confident this will continue to be the case; HTML apps don't look like native apps unless you do a lot of platform-specific work, and then you maybe would have been better off just building native.

In addition to tracking the look, feel and interoperability of the platform, HTML will always be slower than native, simply because there will always be more ways to optimise native apps than HTML apps.

In the end, there is no one-size-fits all solution. There will always be classes of application for which HTML is good enough, classes for which a blend of HTML and native will get you though, and classes for which HTML will not be good enough.

But I suspect that any sufficiently advanced and popular application will almost always move to native eventually. You just cant't integrate with the platform properly, over the long term, any other way.

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

#416

Post by microcolonel »

MuffinFlavored wrote: post #260
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…

Why couldn't they help contribute to/optimize React Native to be faster?

Because the architecture is the primary source of the performance issues.

React Native is widely used by the many-billion-dollar company that originated it, so major performance opportunities are not likely to be low-hanging fruit at this point.

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

#417

Post by ryanwaggoner »

sflicht wrote: post #412
phreack wrote: 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.

Even if you think your app depends on push notifications, your customers don't necessarily want them. I would bet that in 98% of the cases you have in mind, I would be perfectly happy to use the functionality without push notifications. (For example, "all chat". Even if your app is capable of chatting with me, I doubt I actually want it to.)

They were likely referring to chat apps. Good luck building a messaging or chat app without notifications.

Yes, apps over-use notifications for marketing and engagement metrics just like email has been overused. They’re still remarkably useful for a large swath of other use cases, and downright necessary for many others. If you don’t like them, don’t enable them for a given app. Easy.

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

#418

Post by ryanwaggoner »

agumonkey wrote: post #290
apl002 wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ? :)

No one makes you suffer through anything. You can’t get push notifications without specifically opting into them, and you can disable them forever for any app with about 3 taps.

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

#420

Post by amikazmi »

sixstringtheory wrote: post #256
arbhassan wrote: post #124

Meanwhile Shopify's CEO. [1] [1] https://mobile.twitter.com/tobi/status/1222551057798090752

Oof, not classy. I think every developer has had the experience where you think you're so close to the finish, just one more thing... and then hours, days, weeks have gone by. How can he be so sure they're going to strike it big? This is a pictographic sunk cost fallacy.

I read it as "they didn't continue long enough to get to the benefits, as we did", i.e, they already reached the diamonds.
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