Hacker News Reader

Comment by ryanwaggoner | Hacker News Reader

Yes. I switched in 2010 and haven’t regretted it once. More fun, much less framework churn than frontend, and better pay. And if it crashes for some reason, you can switch to something else.

And learn native Swift, not React Native or Flutter or some other fad hybrid approach. It’ll be worth it in the long run.

View on HN

>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 are in heavy demand.

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.

A lot of startups are enamored with React Native and Flutter, which is almost the definition of a fad, but virtually all the big tech companies who pay the most are hiring native devs. Even Google and Facebook who created React Native and Flutter still do way more native dev and hire accordingly.

Better pay is imho not true.

Maybe the lower bound might be higher, but from my experience working in FAANG/IB/HedgeFunds the pay for normal SWEs (web frontend+backend, fullstack, whatever you wanna call it) was always higher than iOS devs. (most of the time much higher).

Not my experience. Native mobile dev is a niche, it’s in high demand, and it’s hard to find good people for. The companies who really need these roles pay well for them and I think it’s also easier to get hired for one of these roles as a result.

And I wouldn’t include IB or hedge funds in those numbers, because building internal tools is rarely where the money is.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com