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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

#481

Post by adev_ »

kllrnohj wrote: post #319
onion2k wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You make a fair point but it's one about the current state of apps rather than the future of apps. In the future phones will be more powerful and apps will do mostly the same stuff. In theory that should mean the apps will be faster.

> In the future phones will be more powerful Single-core performance is largely topping out. The gains are incremental at best. Mobile SoCs have gone incredibly multi-core incredibly quickly (6-8 cores are common!). Meanwhile the web is incredibly bad at handling that. JavaScript code still has to fight with the GC for CPU time on the single thread they both occupy. WebWorkers are incredibly heavy & limited. WebAssem…

> Meanwhile CSS & DOM performance continues to be poor

The DOM is not slow, that is brain washing from React developpers to justify your VDOM.

Most Reactive app performance issue nowadays comes from library bloat loading, network saturation or data dependencies.

The main problem with the DOM is not the performance but the API. The DOM API is not appropriate anymore for a reactive usage with transactional reflows. And this triggers a lot of quirks damaging performance.

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

#482

Post by tjpnz »

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…

>What's missing until regular websites have parity with mobile apps in functionality?

Some means of preventing users from blocking ads and tracking? Sure, there are ways around this for native apps but they're not nearly as trivial as installing an ad blocker (provided the mobile browser supports extensions).

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

#483

Post by taneq »

scarface74 wrote: post #465
sls wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

If it's a niche app, I'd imagine you would monetize it differently than a 99c clicker game (eg. sell a subscription to the app on your website, or supply it as a companion to hardware you sell, or something) and the app itself would most likely be free to install off the web store.

I've seen companies get around the upgrade pricing question by just releasing a new version of their app every year and deprecating the old one.

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

#484

Post by pentae »

berns wrote: post #85
Random_Person wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The sites I build at work have proper push notifications. This problem has already been solved.

How did you solve the lack of push notifications on iOS?

Short answer: He didn't. You cannot do it without your app being in the App Store.

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

#485

Post by pjmlp »

criddell wrote: post #413
pjmlp wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Plenty of native apps are also not the best example of that, and not being able to control when they really die, including background running tasks, doesn't help.

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

#486

Post by pjmlp »

dmitriid wrote: post #380
pjmlp wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Unfortunately I can also provide several items of arcane knowledge for Android and iOS.

So should we now measure who wins in arcane knowledge counts?

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

#487

Post by bsaul »

krrrh wrote: post #477
bsaul wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There are thousands of desktop app developers that never got out of the hobby stage because they couldn’t get past the costs of processing payments, managing refunds, managing download servers, implementing licensing frameworks, implementing a smooth upgrade process, search engine optimization, establishing enough trust with users that they are confident they aren’t installing malware infected software, marketing, pu…

i think you also forget that many people buy ipads because of apps created by developers ( in my case, i believe my app is the direct reason for the sale of my customer's ipad pro). and that developpers need to buy apple hardware to build and distribute on the store. those 30% come in addition to all the revenue generated by hardware sales, because of independant app developers.

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

#488

Post by sandGorgon »

LeoNatan25 wrote: post #117
sandGorgon wrote: post #68

I think one of the coolest things that Shopify is doing is this: We’re sponsoring Software Mansion and Krzysztof Magiera (co-founder of React Native for Android) in their open source efforts around React Native. and We are working with Discord to accelerate the open sourcing of FastList for React Native (a library which only renders list items that are in the viewport) and optimizing for Android. Basically RecyclerVi…

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.

What about Flipkart's https://github.com/Flipkart/recyclerlistview ?

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

#489

Post by bsaul »

scarface74 wrote: post #465
sls wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

"people are usually willing to spend more" : not in my case ( and probably many other)

when i say it is a niche market i mean it not only in terms of number of customers, but also in term of potential generated revenues. there are businesses , especially in artistic fields, where people simply aren't willing to spend a lot of money on accessories, even if they are useful to their job.

now i'm not saying i will never be able to be profitable enough. just that with my current marketshare ( which is very good on a local scale, but not yet worldwide), those 30% are what makes the difference.

ps : as for the revenue model, i had to invent some kind of pay per use model, based on in app purchases.

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

#490

Post by GrayTextIsTruth »

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 was going to build a mobile web app but I don’t like the way iOS handles button clicks on the bottom of the screen. The first click is ignored and it slides up your bottom menu bar, then you can click the button. You don’t have as much control in the browser.
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