Transition to React Native

I think SwiftUI is just as much about platform lock-in by bundling Mac, AppleTV, iPad, and iPhone together as an app fortress. Furthermore it enforces more standard UI/UX which commoditizes apps.

Stepping back, I think we are just seeing a battle of commoditizing your complements. For Coinbase and Facebook, Apple is the complement. For Apple, Coinbase and Facebook are the complement.

The airbnb transition also had (from what I heard) a lot of politics around it. Often the things that make or break large projects aren't necessarily technical but human. For instance, if you hire a ton of native developers and force them to move to React Native without getting buy in from them, you're probably bound to fail.

There will always be technical challenges with any large project. But getting buy in from the right people can make those problems surmountable.

The Airbnb / Udacity story is simple. Brown-fielding RN is not the way to go.

Here's where green-fielding would have also made sense (and a difference) by using a recent example of a new famous product that is NOT using cross-platform tech like React Native / Flutter, and that's Clubhouse.

Last year, they launched their mobile-only native iOS app and everyone was wondering about where the Android app was. It was finally released this month and it took them a year in total. By that time, the hype was already dead, everyone already moved on and didn't care about their app since their competitors copied them to death (And took the Android users with them.)

Had they used React Native or Flutter to build their app, they would have been able to release both platforms quicker and at the same time and become feature complete rather than releasing the Android app feature incomplete with iOS and the Android users still waiting for a year and leaving for the competitors instead as the hype already died.

Now they are stuck with implementing their features on both platform twice. Discord already cloned them as a feature very quickly (using React Native) and now Clubhouse has to catch up with them to bring their lost users back. Given how fierce competing with social networking / messaging companies are, I do not think using native in 2020 / 2021 for a new product was a good idea in this case and green-fielding a RN or Flutter app would have made sense to iterate quickly.

To explain further why I think iOS is harder

- Where will you learn it? Apple documentation is bad. remember this? "On Apple's Piss-Poor Documentation", 1180 points to date https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25046691 Android documentation is great. Yes there are at least 5 ways to do something e.g. schedule background work, load files, but its very clearly deprecated in their docs/ in the code. You can, read the code because it is open source. If you find a bug in Apple's library, what do you do?

- There are more developers, more stack overflow questions/ answers and more resources on the internet in general for Android. So even when Android has edge cases/ backwards compatibility issues, its more likely than iOS that someone has written about it.

- Apple tooling is bad: Xcode is not a good IDE to put it lightly. It gets 3 stars on the App Store. The actual code editing part is just a text editor, e.g. searching for function calls involves using the search function, as opposed to a keyboard shortcut that uses static code analysis. Most warnings for your code won't show up until you try to build it, therefore the feedback loop is extremely slow. Many iOS developers I've known admit they do not like Xcode. To upload your iOS app to the app store, you upload gigabytes of binaries. Code refactoring features do not exist on Xcode. Android Studio is one of the best IDE's I've used, and constantly adds support for more features: WorkManager inspector, deploy/debug multiple devices at once. Also, new features come out for Android Studio all the time, and Xcode seems to have not been updated with features that benefit me for a long time. Jetbrains IDEs generally work straight off the bat, and I'm very happy to see AppCode (Xcode competitor by Jetbrains) available, though it is thoroughly buggy at the moment, I still use it because writing code is nicer in AppCode.

- Basic things in the apple ecosystem are broken/ buggy: e.g. New developers in a team will have issues signing their application with the company team, the trick/ fix is to remove/ add a Xcode/ iOS capability to the project, and remove it immediately. Then signing will work. Signing the app is literally the first thing that needs to be done, why is this not fixed?

- Swift is much nicer than Objective-C to program in, but its not as nice as Kotlin. I don't want to get into programming language comparison (im sure there are connoisseurs here who can), but my opinion of reading Swift code is they are less readable and results in unusual architecture. Swift apps are also slower and bigger than Objective-C apps. Some Apple APIs are also designed in a painfully complicated way. It seems like they do not get much feedback from developers about their APIs, whereas Android is constantly getting feedback and improving. Some developers complain that Swift has changed, breaking older Swift code. I haven't heard this from Kotlin developers.

Sorry that felt like a rant. In the end you've can choose based on

- Comfort: Android is much more ergonomic for the reasons above

- Developer competition: You'll be competing with more Android developers worldwide: Android is more than 85% of the smartphone market

- Money: iOS costs $100 annually (not much but if you're starting out your first app, maybe it is). The upside is if you live in a rich country, many people use iPhones, and they also tend to spend more money on the app store.

- Market trends: iOS has added ATT/ privacy features. They've also got powerful chips but it seems like no one has learnt how to use them yet. They are ahead on hardware (M1, A14), they've got great market share in Western countries, and are poised to take even more with recent developments.