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Comment by CharlesW | Hacker News Reader

You can target Android with Swift/Swift UI with SKIP.tools (skip.tools) and SCADE (scade.io), both of which use native controls on Android as well.

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I always hear about projects like this or even back before Swift, like Codename One which allows iOS apps to be written with Java and my question is- does anyone actually use these? Why do this rather than use React Native, Flutter, Kotlin Multiplatform, even .NET MAUI or whatever Microsoft is on? One would assume that if these were good solutions more people would be adopting them.

Why is Codename One lesser than Flutter?

Plenty of companies/people use it. It's open source with commercial backing. It's free for commercial use. It existed well before flutter. Uses a language people actually use (Java) as opposed to Dart.

Why would people use flutter which is constantly in danger of being spring cleaned by Google since it makes absolutely no commercial sense. Without Google's support it becomes an unsustainable over engineered brick of code.

Maybe it’s a marketing and perception thing. You’d hear more about PhoneGap or Cordova even than Codename One.

It doesn't have the same level of traction for sure. But it's still popular enough and has support unlike PhoneGap which was discontinued. There are advantages to working with smaller companies where you "know" the individual contributors.

It also came out way after PhoneGap and wasn't backed by a huge company with a huge marketing budget.

Skip is very new. It's interesting because it lets you use SwiftUI and results in human-maintainable Kotlin/Jetpack code, so you can walk away from the tool (although you can also now run Swift on Android too without transpiling)

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