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Ask HN: Is it worth switching from web development to native iOS dev?

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Re: Ask HN: Is it worth switching from web development to native iOS dev?

#61

Post by dfansteel »

gregkerzhner wrote: post #47
dfansteel wrote: post #45

I've been an iOS dev for... 12 years now. And I love it. I'm in a position now where I'm learning Android for the first time. It's Kotlin and I don't hate it. And I'm still trying to learn back end. I can't code my way out of a box using HTML. I guess you'd say I can't code my way out of a The ecosystem is amazing. I love the tools. Xcode is a joy of an IDE to work with. There's some room to improve, but compared to…

Curious how you have handled some of these challenges: 1. What do you do to avoid massive view controllers? I have found that a lot of iOS apps I have worked on end up having the view controller be responsible for doing everything from fetching data from an API to setting the corner radius on some component. This leads to view controllers being really big and not unit tested. 2. Do you do anything to explicitly keep…

1. Don't have massive VCs by not having massive VCs. That sounds unhelpful, but hear me out... You're asking the VC to do too much. Break that sucker down. Have many, many small classes that do small things. Use libraries for stuff. A VC should be a hub to transit data from the user to a model us MVVC, MVP, MVC... I don't care, every architecture has their acolyte.

2. No. Again not helpful. This is a domain specific problem. I will say I'm waging a now multi-decade war against singletons. Dependency injection is the way to go. For Swift checkout Swinject, it really superpowers your testing.

3. Haven't touched it... yet. My primary projects need to ship and my secondary projects haven't hit the point of UI. Won't until later this year. Then I'll deal with SwiftUI. Combine, however, is my new hawtness and I recommend diving into.

Re: Ask HN: Is it worth switching from web development to native iOS dev?

#62

Post by ryanwaggoner »

onion2k wrote: post #27
schlu wrote: post #16

In my opinion here are the pros: - iOS will be around a long time. - Big brands and startups are basically required to have an app in the App Store if they want to succeed. - Every year a new version comes out that requires developers to fix bugs and sometimes adopt new technology. Here are the cons: - Extremely difficult to build an indie business on iOS given that there is a single distribution channel that you don…

Big brands and startups are basically required to have an app in the App Store if they want to succeed. I don't think that will continue to be the case for much longer. It's mirroring the web to an extent - for a long time every business needed to have a website, and now more and more don't bother with anything more than a holding page that directs users to a few social media accounts. Brand apps are likely to go the…

People have been saying this for a decade.

Re: Ask HN: Is it worth switching from web development to native iOS dev?

#63

Post by zepto »

kick wrote: post #60
zepto wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No but it’s obvious there could be.

Nothing valuable, and especially nothing that shouldn't be done with a website.

Just because you don’t personally value something doesn’t mean it isn’t valuable. Anyway, it’s clear that the issue here is that you simply want apps to go away. Not that they are.

Re: Ask HN: Is it worth switching from web development to native iOS dev?

#64

Post by hstreet »

ryanwaggoner wrote: post #62
onion2k wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Big brands and startups are basically required to have an app in the App Store if they want to succeed. I don't think that will continue to be the case for much longer. It's mirroring the web to an extent - for a long time every business needed to have a website, and now more and more don't bother with anything more than a holding page that directs users to a few social media accounts. Brand apps are likely to go the…

People have been saying this for a decade.

I can promise that they'll be saying this a decade from now too, without much changing.

Re: Ask HN: Is it worth switching from web development to native iOS dev?

#65

Post by mygo »

jpttsn wrote: post #53
schlu wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't have any direct experience of building a business on Android. Last I heard iOS users spend more money on the App Store than Android users. I think this implies it is harder. I would think they are both pretty difficult probably in the same order of magnitude to each other.

If the walled garden is that bad for indies, indies should do way better on Android, right?

There is significantly more money inside that walled garden. Just a more qualified customer base in terms of willingness to pay.

Re: Ask HN: Is it worth switching from web development to native iOS dev?

#66

Post by danpeterjk »

For web:

It's easier to test UI You can choose the language of your preference Easier to be cross-platform For native:

No browser bugs to worry about Easier to just get started (fewer dependencies) Less worry about supporting outdated OSes I have visited INORU https://www.inoru.com/ios-app-development for better iOS development

Re: Ask HN: Is it worth switching from web development to native iOS dev?

#67

Post by andrewrothman »

aphextron wrote: post #4
Hamuko wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And learn native Swift, not React Native or Flutter or some other fad hybrid approach. It’ll be worth it in the long run. How? Feels to me like I keep seeing recruitment for cross-platform devs more than native devs. And a lot of companies seem interested in pumping out cross-platform apps from a single codebase than developing separate native apps.

>And a lot of companies seem interested in pumping out cross-platform apps from a single codebase than developing separate native apps. There will always be a need for expert native devs who can build high performance apps. There are things you simply cannot do with crossplatform apps, specifically things like low level OpenGL code and edge ML. Yes there are less of these jobs, but they tend to pay much better and ar…

Both OpenGL shader code and on-device ML can be done in React Native. However, you likely won't reach full native performance today.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1HYnrdKEVMU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LbcuLfrt8XA https://heartbeat.fritz.ai/image-classification-on-react-nat...

You're right there will always be a very high demand for native engineers to build the underlying bridge code to back these capabilities. As cross-platform tools gain new bridged capabilities and become faster (https://engineering.fb.com/android/hermes/), as they have been slowly, I think the use-cases where using something like React Native or Flutter is possible and makes sense will grow.

Re: Ask HN: Is it worth switching from web development to native iOS dev?

#68

Post by jpttsn »

mygo wrote: post #65
jpttsn wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the walled garden is that bad for indies, indies should do way better on Android, right?

There is significantly more money inside that walled garden. Just a more qualified customer base in terms of willingness to pay.

So: on net, the single distribution channel provides access to paying customers, in turn making it easier—-not harder—-for indies to build a business there.

Which makes it wrong to say iOS’s single distribution channel is bad for indies: it’s actually good for indies.

Unless you claim that walled garden and paying users occurring together is a sheer coincidence.

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