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

551–560 of 588 posts

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

#551

Post by pvinis »

fingerlocks wrote: post #261
anon9001 wrote: post #76

Shopify is right to use React Native. I build an app with React Native Web and we produce Android/iOS/web from the same code base with 3 developers. No, it's not perfect. Yes, JS can be awkward and confusing. Yes, a truly native app built by expert platform-specific developers would be better. But I'm able to ship this product with less than half the team size I would need for native development. JavaScript developer…

> they don't need to know any objc/swift/java/kotlin to build the product. I have a hard time believing this, and I've been making apps on both platforms for >10 years. And I love react-native. My latest day job is basically forking popular react-native packages, often rewriting them in Swift, fixing numerous bugs, and adding features specific for our company. And all this experience has taught me that in no way can…

Maybe it's better phrased as "they don't ALL need to know..", as long as some of them know.

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

#552

Post by seemack »

pjmlp wrote: post #543
dmitriid wrote: post #519

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. We could. The web would lose hands down. The Web lacks even the most primitive of UI primitives that desktop and mobile UI kits have had for decades . Virtual lists is the prime example. You can't even reliably animate an element independently of other elements without breaking your entire page. You can't pick an arbitrary group of components and place them in a different location of the page without them breaki…

Sure you can animate, that is what WebGL and SVG allow for. Ah, like breaking Android UIs when dealing with fragment management or misplaced constraints on ConstraintLayout, usually only solvable after one finds the golden post on medium?

That's not really a fair comparison. I don't think WebGL and SVG allow you to do the type of animation OP is referring to.

Furthermore, ConstraintLayout is a brand-new layout manager. Totally agree that there's bugs in it but nothing that could be called arcane knowledge. Do you have any examples for the actually arcane layout managers? Relative, Layout, etc?

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

#553

Post by s_y_n_t_a_x »

artsr wrote: post #514
s_y_n_t_a_x wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It emulates the UI, so the fake is noticeable, and it will be hard for them to maintain perfect 1:1. RN on the other hand bridges the native UI w/ your code via a JS bridge. The downside is the bridge can be a bottleneck so you have to be careful how much you congest it. The result is being able to expose every native functionality and abstract it anyway you want using React extensions. Flutter plans to target deskto…

Don't know why you're being downvoted. These all are perfectly reasonable concerns. I've seen many GUI frameworks fail because of a mix of these reasons.

Either Google or someone else w/ a vengeance follows me around and downvotes me haha.

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

#554

Post by bsaul »

scarface74 wrote: post #546
bsaul wrote: post #542

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's one way to look at it. All businesses come down to balancing income with expenses indeed. All i'm saying is that 30% cut on the income by apple makes it harder , and sometimes impossible , for some business model to survive.

Understood. But do you know how many businesses would die to be able to sell products that had a 70% gross profit margin?

I'm not sure about your calculation. A business with only 29% gross profit margin wouldn't be able to survive on the app store because they'd have to give 30% to apple.

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

#555

Post by s_y_n_t_a_x »

greatjack613 wrote: post #524
s_y_n_t_a_x wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Flutter is only in beta for desktop and web. And it's emulated UI, not true native UI. RN is ready now and today for all platforms, including Window via react-native-windows. Microsoft is choosing React, I wouldn't go w/ Flutter. Why would you choose a Google only language and framework... unless you like rewriting code when it dies. Also, w/ React you can use TypeScript or JS, you don't have to learn a new language.…

As much as I hate that google kills stuff often, the above comment is missing the fact that facebook also kills stuff often, they just never had any adoption in the first place so you don't notice

But React is more open source and flexible. Microsoft has embraced React and RN via their react-native-windows project, they are currently rewriting it from C# to C++, so it must be important.

They use it for Skype and other products.

Google isn't built on Flutter, not the important parts. Facebook has been building their stuff w/ React. They have over 10,000 components, I doubt they'll abandon it.

Even if they do, React is much more flexible and open, it doesn't have a compiler or language tied to it either. If Google drops Flutter, you're fucked.

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

#556

Post by heedlessly3 »

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?

for iOS you can have a work around. The users using the web based app in safari, then whenever a notification needs to be sent, twilio api will send a SMS message to alert the user. Of course it will only send an sms message if the user allows it and enters the mobile number.

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

#557

Post by dmitriid »

pjmlp wrote: post #543
dmitriid wrote: post #519

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. We could. The web would lose hands down. The Web lacks even the most primitive of UI primitives that desktop and mobile UI kits have had for decades . Virtual lists is the prime example. You can't even reliably animate an element independently of other elements without breaking your entire page. You can't pick an arbitrary group of components and place them in a different location of the page without them breaki…

Sure you can animate, that is what WebGL and SVG allow for. Ah, like breaking Android UIs when dealing with fragment management or misplaced constraints on ConstraintLayout, usually only solvable after one finds the golden post on medium?

> Sure you can animate, that is what WebGL and SVG allow for.

Yeah, sure. Try animating an element without breaking layout. Trying animating an element that gets destroyed (oh, it's impossible, there are no events for when element gets removed). Try smooth animation while changing layout. And so on and so on.

Yeah, sure. If you constrain your entire animation to just the one box of a single SVG/Canvas/WebGL, then you can pretend that everything is fine. In reality when you try to animate anything, you're really constrained to animations that don't force re-flow. So, about 3 of them. And you have to be really careful (transposing an element's position will leave gaps).

Meanwhile both desktop and mobile have hundreds of animations big and small that are either impossible or extremely hard to do in a consistent manner on the web.

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

#558

Post by the_gipsy »

the_gipsy wrote: post #511
rubyn00bie wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I will never enable push notifications from websites. This problem has not been solved. It also doesn't hold across devices or if the browser isn't open.

Why not? You do, for apps, right? App PNs also don't "hold" across devices. You don't need to have the browser "open", whatever that means. BTW there are tons of apps that do push notifications wrong. There are many apps which keep sending you PNs after you log out or switch accounts. This can be really sensitive content (e.g. chat apps).

Replying to myself, here is a NSFW example: https://www.reddit.com/r/tifu/comments/e8ux6j/tifu_by_lettin...

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

#559

Post by Ntrails »

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…

What if the issue with facebook wasn't HTML5 but rather feature bloat and a focus on Ad placement?

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

#560

Post by jakedub4d2 »

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…

Yes! This is something that would greatly benefit the app world.
Post reply on HN