For UI you always want to use the a platform or OS’ native controls and APIs rather than some stack on top of it for best performance and a polished look and feel. Anything else is most often second class.
The WebView on Android and iOS supports configuring an interop function. It allows you to map a JavaScript function to Java/ObjC functions. In my case, I had a single function with a single string argument, which I used to pass JSON messages.
I then implemented a callback mechanism where each message would get a unique ID. From JavaScript code, I could call a function in the shared C++ core and get a callback when data is returned.
The shared C++ code can directly access the internet and filesystem (I read in another comment that they changed this recently?).
The performance of the WebView is amazing, especially if you just rawdog it and write plain JavaScript. Modern JavaScript is nothing like it was back in the IE6 days.
With flat UIs, at the end of the day, who cares that it "doesn't feel native". What price are you willing to pay just so that it "feels native"?
I don't know the state of QWidgets on iOS/Android but my guess is it's even worse than QML if at all possible.
The UI is completely separated from the core of the app, and the core can be compiled natively or target Web Assembly.
I’m building the UI with HTML and JS (by the way, Web Components feel way better than React) and running the whole app in the browser (via WASM).
Eventually, I’d like to create native applications for all platforms, but I don’t have the time to spend on that right now. When the time comes, I’ll be able to easily remove the HTML frontend and bolt on a new one written specifically for the target platform.
This lets me prioritize dev speed in the short term and native UX in the long term.
We heard that the Node.js version had quite high velocity initially, but slowed down greatly when it came to polishing. Like more than half of the time spent on the last 5%. The QML version also ran more smoothly.