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

461–470 of 588 posts

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

#461

Post by charlesju »

secondo wrote: post #10

Arguably the biggest concern with React Native is that it is controlled by a single entity, Facebook, and that they are not one of the leading mobile platforms who from a business perspective have strong incentives to ensure the future of their respective app eco systems. Facebook's incentives with React Native are somewhat unclear. This is a big, yet often unspoken, reason companies are vary of depending on React Na…

It's open source. If you don't like the direction, fork it and do something new with the project.

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

#462

Post by scarface74 »

dictum wrote: post #444
scarface74 wrote: post #439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So these same people couldn’t spend $300 on a used 2014 Mac Mini but could buy a PC?

In those places, old Apple hardware isn't significantly cheaper than new hardware. You might get a 25% discount for a degraded experience (security updates may end in ~3 years) or buy much older hardware (e.g. 9 year old models) that cannot run current macOS and Xcode, etc. And yes, a local PC can work out to lower prices due to specific tax arrangements, sourcing components straight from manufacturers and assembling…

So do you expect Apple to give away Mac OS if they did allow it to run on a VM or should they go back to charging $129 for the OS like they use to (and like MS still does)?

The current version of OS X runs on the 2012 Mac Mini. I see one on eBay for $145.

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

#463

Post by wvenable »

true_religion wrote: post #447
wvenable wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have what I'm saying backwards. I'm not talking about a small dev team. My whole point is that when you have a large dev team, that you don't need that platform abstraction because you have the manpower to handle multiple platforms natively. Especially if you are a software company and not just a widget company that also has an app. > It turns out being able to get additional employees that don't need extensive m…

From what I see, anytime you have separate iOS and Android apps, they will rapidly diverge on features and UX to the point where it feels like different programs working with the same data set. RN lets you have 1 team working on the same app, so the features are the same. In theory, you could enforce that all features must be present in all apps, but in practice it never seems to happen.

That's still a management problem, not a technological one.

Many of cross platform apps seem just slightly off compared to native ones. There are exceptions but those exceptions but they have a lot of work put into them to make them seem native -- something you get for free when you actually are native.

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

#464

Post by asdff »

buboard wrote: post #225
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 m a web fanatic and use only the browser. My other apps are dropbox and skype , a decibel meter and strava, so things that cant exist on the web anyway. I use multiple gmail accounts so webmail is better Since most content apps use browser links at some point it doesn’t even make sense to e.g. have a twitter app Now, i wish we could have a better api than web push notifications though

I'm kind of done with notifications on my phone. Plenty of apps turn approving legitimate notifications into an excuse to push ads or attempts at engagement through os notifications. The most recent offender on my phone was the moovit app, that sent something inane with emojis in the notification. deleted.

I don't even have email notifications anymore. Just texts and calls from contacts. Notifications just serve to divert your attention from the task at hand. If I want to sit down and be distracted by reddit or whatever, it will be on my own time by my own choice damnit.

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

#465

Post by scarface74 »

sls wrote: post #440
scarface74 wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Marking things up 43% generally impacts sales.

If it is a “specialized”,”pro” niche app people are usually willing to spend more.

It’s hard to make a living selling a niche app to price sensitive people.

Also if it is a niche app, with a small addressable market, how do you continue making money on it since their is no facility for upgrade pricing - especially since you have to keep releasing updates to support newer devices and new screen sizes?

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

#466

Post by asdff »

giovannibonetti wrote: post #435
raydev wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you’re touching on something extremely important here. IME, anecdotally, not backed up by data: experienced native Android devs are getting harder and harder to find. The ones I’ve known personally hated it so much they moved to backend or full stack jobs.

Interesting, I always thought it would be harder to hire iOS devs since the initial cost is higher - you need to buy a more expensive Apple computer and pay an yearly $99 subscription just to get started. For that reason I thought that there would be way more Android devs. After all, a teenager with a regular computer can start developing Android apps and download the APK in a cheap Android device without paying anyt…

you don't need a mac to build ios apps.

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

#468

Post by gopkarthik »

koheripbal wrote: post #243
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…

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.

That's true along with proper notification support. Firefox for Android has 'Add to Home Screen' and was one of the reasons along with extension support for my switch from chrome.

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

#469

Post by ericlewis »

microcolonel wrote: post #416
MuffinFlavored wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Someone I work with on react-native just sped up large text parsing by 40% or so.

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

#470

Post by paulryanrogers »

alexsexotic wrote: post #426
doctor_eval wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

Did you ever heard of WeChat? The Facebook quivalent of China, which is on its own an operating system serving many miniapps. What's interesting about it it lets other apps access qr scanning and the WeChat wallet for payment.

Is WeChat an example of React Native?
Post reply on HN