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Building all of our new mobile apps using React Native

engineering.shopify.com

501–510 of 588 posts

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

#501
post #94
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

For iOS, can't you just wrap your web application in a thin native app layer that provides the push functionality?

Yes you can and we are exactly doing this since quite a while. Actually a lot of companies do this.

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

#502
Shopify is associated with e-commerce shops. It would be much bigger news if this would be about an app for core e-commerce journeys, but Spotify builds Apps mostly for the merchants or in-store use cases where customers physically are already paying for a product. Performance matters less in such use cases as merchants or customers are already locked-in in the purchase flow and a drop out would be more costly for them (no sale). This is in no way comparable to AirBnb use cases.

The use cases they migrated to React Native are rather simple - a list of orders, which customers will choose to use in order to get the status of their order - the customer's need is very high and optimization here does not bring much business value (conversions). The POS use case is stronger due to the expected responsiveness that is required, though it can degrade slowly over time and will not be noticeable (boiling frog) like in phones.

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

#503

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

their existence annoys

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

#504

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I was under the impression that under memory pressure all of the tabs in every mobile browser (Firefox/Safari/Edge) I have ever used is unloaded by iOS.

There is an edge mobile browser?

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

#506
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post #489

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"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…

I think perhaps your business model isn't as solid as you might think. Producing an app is not a free pass to live on the revenue, and the market capture is an important part. I'm not an app developer, I'm in the music industry (day job in IT infra), but it seems to me there are some people projecting their bad business sense onto Apple. As per my other comment in this thread, and the reply someone made for me, the c…

I don’t understand your comment. I have other sources of revenue, mainly doing development for customers. I didn’t bet everything on that app and raised money on the expectation this would be a gold mine. I’m just stating a fact : without those 30%, in my present situation, i could live only based on this app revenues. With the 30% cut, i can’t.

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

#507
post #477
post #369

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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…

> There are thousands of desktop app developers that never got out of the hobby stage

There's so much money out there searching for an investment. It's a shame really.

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

#508
post #457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Users hate web apps, especially on mobile, and it has nothing to do with functionality. Web apps on the App Store invariably provoke angry screeds about how the look and feel is not right. Native apps are even more essential on mobile. On the desktop, web apps just look weird and waste battery life. On mobile, they feel wrong. That difference in feel provokes visceral hatred.

The biggest problem with mobile apps is that you don't always have a reliable connection to the internet, even when your carrier is claiming you have 4g lte with all the bars. Web apps should really have the option to cache the page entirely for offline use.

They do. It's called a PWA. Service workers cache the assets.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Service_Wor...

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

#509
post #30

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…

No mobile website has match the performance of native though

No 2D renderer has matched the rendering engine of chromium aka skia. Show benchmarcks otherwise, instead of hearsay evidence.

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

#510

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…

This would be great if HTTP, HTML and co would have been designed as a stateful low-latency application platform and not a distributed encyclopaedia. Retrofitting state and all of the things you listed into it resulted in the Javascript mayhem which is quite pathetic for several reasons including security and energy consumption. I think the future should be native applications that can be optimized for data transfer and latency, have much better security and stateful behaviour by default.
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