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Comment by j45 | Hacker News Reader

I think I’ve rebuilt one app in early every web/hybrid framework. They all failed including ionic.

For one reason or another, beyond the usual and small trade offs between platforms, they have all ultimately failed, become overly complicated to maintain and add more logic to. Especially an issue has been the special punishment of having the same codebase work in a dev environment on Mac/windows/Linux.

One tech I see being part of the next curve (the prior curve being things like reactnative, etc) is Flutter, or others like it.

First class dev environments, first class documentation.

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Because it seems you have some experience in the field: is there a way to develop and support a multi-platform app in 2023 without suffering? The idea of having to hire 2(x n)FTE to handle developing mobile apps which will, at the end of the day, look and feel the same to the user, is killing me. What's the least worst option out there?

Nope, you can limit the suffering for your devs by using Expo (RN) or Flutter (Needs Dart).

The issue is as soon as you stray off the well laid path similar to the old create-react-app problems you have to choose "do things their way" or "Suffer all the problems you avoided with the framework + all the problems of the library you added".

For example at work I help maintain a React-Native app that is one of the core parts of our business, We investigated Expo but we use sodium in the app for keypair generation and its not supported. So we can't have any of Expo's benefits because of one unsupported library. (its supported in iOS and Web but not Android...)

* There are packages that implement sodium in expo but they score too poorly on their security scores for us to use them.

Those FTE will need to understand the native SDKs no matter what, when the abstractions leak someone will need to debug them.

I think it depends on the app. Some apps have a lot more interaction with the platform than others. E.g. writing a camera app in Flutter is going to be like 80% platform native code. Writing e.g. a GitHub app is probably going to be 0%.

If it is 0% most likely is doable as mobile Web, no need for hybrid headaches.

Yeah in a lot of cases you definitely could. But well written mobile apps are still better than well written mobile web sites. Sometimes much better depending on the application.

E.g. I would not like to give up the Gmail app and use the web interface.

I'm currently a Android native developer with 7 years experience and have used Appcelerator/Titanium and Iconic + Angular before that. IMO if you're writting an app that only makes API calls and draws to the screen, then using cross platform SDKs is going to save you time.

But if you need to use any platform specific native SDKs like camera/push notifications or other 3rd party native SDKs, you're going to be in a world of pain.

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