Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I'm Sticking with Native iOS Development

riveralabs.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

1–10 of 25 posts

Re: I'm Sticking with Native iOS Development

#2

Post by pzo »

I'm doing the opposite even though been ios dev for a decade and now learning react / react native. Reasons: - golden days of mobile apps are gone, these days less and less people download apps

- it is more important to have desktop / mobile web app these days

- pwa and mobile apps and tech are slowly getting good enough

- if you are native ios or android you are limiting your jobs and business opportunities - native mobile dev is like niche inside niche these days. Probably half of jobs is typescript/javascript/ python related.

- in current market and ai landscape your have to prototype and ship fast to be competitive even at the cost of slighly worse UX

Re: I'm Sticking with Native iOS Development

#3

Post by refulgentis »

For what it's worth, economically for an individual, it's sort of the reverse in my experience. I feel like I snuck into Google in ~2016 because pure-iOS is so rare. I only had 1 out of 7 interviewers who worked on iOS, 2 who had tangential brief experience, 4 who had never used it. Also, Swift was new, so the people who did know iOS couldn't really speak to it when I used it to write code.

If I'm launching a product, I'm doing Flutter. To me, it's Swift but with no rough edges. Most importantly for a product, it lets me maximize leverage and get cross-platform. The performance is really astonishing compared to my days with React Native, it's native in that it's not being JIT'd.

But if I'm happy with a nice gig / set of consulting clients doing iOS, that's great, probably can do that until the end of time. I think we're seeing the first wave of startups doing Flutter to maximize engineering leverage, but long-term, it's too divisive to have a singular Flutter codebase for most large businesses. They'll specialize.

Re: I'm Sticking with Native iOS Development

#4

Post by yatz »

Unless you are in the business of building apps for others, in my experience, cross-platform development rarely works. The amount of time you spend on implementing platform-specific conditional logic, dealing with UI latency, additional debugging time due to cross-platform masking actual errors, and above all keeping your codebase in order, outweighs the benefits by a huge margin.

The team that originally started might do a decent job but over time new people come on board, deadlines and other challenges make people start cutting corners and making design choices inconsistent with the original designers leading these codebases to become unmanageable.

What can work with some serious dev team discipline is to build common frameworks that you can use cross-platform and never dare to attempt cross-platform user interfaces.

Re: I'm Sticking with Native iOS Development

#5

Post by giantg2 »

Isn't true native iOS development objective-C?

But yeah, this article is basically the same for me, only I'm an Android dev. I don't release anything on iOS. I probably would if it wasn't for that $100/year Apple dev fee. My stuff is free, so why should I pay Apple such a high fee. If I did write for iOS, I'd probably do Swift or SwiftUI at first to learn it. Then maybe I'd look at a cross-platform framework.

Re: I'm Sticking with Native iOS Development

#6

Post by pjmlp »

giantg2 wrote: post #5

Isn't true native iOS development objective-C? But yeah, this article is basically the same for me, only I'm an Android dev. I don't release anything on iOS. I probably would if it wasn't for that $100/year Apple dev fee. My stuff is free, so why should I pay Apple such a high fee. If I did write for iOS, I'd probably do Swift or SwiftUI at first to learn it. Then maybe I'd look at a cross-platform framework.

Metal is the last Framework that was designed Objective-C first, everything else now is focused on Swift.

However a big difference to Android, is that you don't see Objective-C shots from Swift team, as Kotlin/Compose folks do against Java (while using Java 8 as counter example, and ignoring the ecosystem Kotlin depends on), which has really put me off from Android.

Re: I'm Sticking with Native iOS Development

#9

Post by dreamcompiler »

pzo wrote: post #2

I'm doing the opposite even though been ios dev for a decade and now learning react / react native. Reasons: - golden days of mobile apps are gone, these days less and less people download apps - it is more important to have desktop / mobile web app these days - pwa and mobile apps and tech are slowly getting good enough - if you are native ios or android you are limiting your jobs and business opportunities - native…

Completely agree. "Download our App!" is a huge red flag. It suggests at best that some VP at the company wanted to check a box and at worst that the company wants to harvest your sweet, sweet personal data and they cannot do so with a mere website.

There are some apps whose existence makes sense like Uber and turn-by-turn navigation but the vast majority of apps now should just be websites.

Post reply on HN