Why you should NOT use NativeScript
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Why you should NOT use NativeScript
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Re: Why you should NOT use NativeScript
#2> We are about to rebuild our Android app in Flutter from scratch now…
Why not use Java/Kotlin if its just on android? Flutter has its advantages sure, but from my experience developing with flutter is the apps end up a bit slower than native, and often you end up interacting with the Java ecosystem on android anyway so the experience doesn't end up being that much better.
Re: Why you should NOT use NativeScript
#3I do wish the technical criticisms and the social criticisms were separated out a bit more. The social aspects of this article heavily imply there's another side to the story.
Re: Why you should NOT use NativeScript
#4> We are about to rebuild our Android app in Flutter from scratch now… Why not use Java/Kotlin if its just on android? Flutter has its advantages sure, but from my experience developing with flutter is the apps end up a bit slower than native, and often you end up interacting with the Java ecosystem on android anyway so the experience doesn't end up being that much better.
It's still in Beta, but Jetpack Compose is really nice to work with IMO. If you have a real excuse for a greenfield rewrite, I'd give it a good look, especially if you can afford to wait at least a year before releasing for stuff like a11y to improve.
Re: Why you should NOT use NativeScript
#5I do wish the technical criticisms and the social criticisms were separated out a bit more. The social aspects of this article heavily imply there's another side to the story.
I added my lot in as a response.
Re: Why you should NOT use NativeScript
#6Having spent a few months at work attempting to build an application in NativeScript, my advice to others is don't touch it with a ten-foot pole.
It is marketed as a holy grail for mobile development, but it is very, very immature. It should be considered an experimental technology.
Why do I say that? It has a severe lack of features and a high bug count.
It claims to support CSS but in fact it only supports about 10% of what CSS can do in the browser.
It also has an insanely huge backlog of bugs, which you can see for yourself on GitHub. I filed a bug report for what is a fatal flaw IMO: you can't write unit tests against async code. The dev team acknowledged it is a problem and yet it has collected dust for a year. No serious business should use a tool that doesn't allow you to write unit tests. https://github.com/NativeScript/nativescript-angular/issues/...
Re: Why you should NOT use NativeScript
#7> We are about to rebuild our Android app in Flutter from scratch now… Why not use Java/Kotlin if its just on android? Flutter has its advantages sure, but from my experience developing with flutter is the apps end up a bit slower than native, and often you end up interacting with the Java ecosystem on android anyway so the experience doesn't end up being that much better.
The message I'm getting from Google is that flutter is the future and will get more support eventually. You can also see it in their fuchsia os which is heavily focused on the ecosystem.
Re: Why you should NOT use NativeScript
#8> We are about to rebuild our Android app in Flutter from scratch now… Why not use Java/Kotlin if its just on android? Flutter has its advantages sure, but from my experience developing with flutter is the apps end up a bit slower than native, and often you end up interacting with the Java ecosystem on android anyway so the experience doesn't end up being that much better.
The message I'm getting from Google is that flutter is the future and will get more support eventually. You can also see it in their fuchsia os which is heavily focused on the ecosystem.
There is absolutely no way flutter unseats java/kotlin unless it abandons dart and adopts kotlin as its language. Its much more likely that flutter gets absorbed in some way by the android ecosystem.
Re: Why you should NOT use NativeScript
#9This post is on point. I spent a good amount of time working on multiple NativeScript apps (NS with Angular and NS with Vue) and can attest that the documentation is not good enough and that there are serious bugs that are pointed out and never fixed or addressed.
I will say that open-source is a good thing to do and that they are not solving an easy problem - developing native mobile apps with multiple JS frameworks like Angular and Vue. Good on them for the effort. On top of that, there is definitely a market need for an Angular / Vue / JS to native app library for people that don't want to use React-Native for whatever reason.
However, with that said...marketing their software as production ready, easy-to-use, and working out of the box while it being the exact opposite is harmful to the companies and developers that sink serious time and effort into building with NS. There needs to be more awareness like this blog post about how people should stay away from NS because of the issues mentioned. That is not being negative - it is being ethical and doing the right thing for the companies and developers that would end up having broken apps and serious sunken costs into platform that doesn't live up to what it says it does.
I have many Github issues that were acknowledged as bugs but never addressed or fixed. I even offered a workaround that people are probably still using to this day because they never fixed certain bugs and docs. I haven't really interacted with the NS people too much besides on a few issues that weren't answered, so I can't comment on their attitude, but I can attest that everything else the OP is saying is true about NS not being a good solution.
NS isn't soo terrible where nothing ever works. I believe the apps I worked on are still running in production. But, I'll put it this way - everyone learned from the experience that using NS is definitely not a good idea to use for developing mobile apps.
Re: Why you should NOT use NativeScript
#10> We are about to rebuild our Android app in Flutter from scratch now… Why not use Java/Kotlin if its just on android? Flutter has its advantages sure, but from my experience developing with flutter is the apps end up a bit slower than native, and often you end up interacting with the Java ecosystem on android anyway so the experience doesn't end up being that much better.
The message I'm getting from Google is that flutter is the future and will get more support eventually. You can also see it in their fuchsia os which is heavily focused on the ecosystem.
I'd be surprised if this actually materializes. Most likely google will abandon the project (whether by killing it or just moving all the talent to something else.
Keeping up to date native Android/iOS functionality by basically reimplementing it bugs and all is an endless demanding work requiring strong talent that will never be good enough for all your use cases and will churn anyone who works on it both from the work itself and the constant complaints of the community.
No other programming powerhouse would be willing to partake in this or even be able to keep up - you won't see an AirBnB, Microsoft or Wix commitment like you did with React-Native, where these companies were active contributors to the core and have low-level libraries of their own.
Google is the last company I'll put my money for doing long term maintenance on an open source project, let alone one with no prospect for monetization or search market-share.
There's really only one way that Flutter survives - and that's if somehow Android moves to it as a first class citizen.
This is immensely unlikely. And probably will doom Android. And in the impossible case where it will - it means iOS will become second citizen.