Re:Ask HN: How to Build an iPhone App in 2020?
by oldprogrammer2 on Friday September 11, 2020 @02:46PM
(#24446029)
This was my experience with Xamarin. It was easy to get started, but then it was nearly impossible to get the "finer points" working just right. Instead of just doing "x" I was fighting the tools to get "y" to do "x", with that extra level abstraction sometimes requiring custom code to generate the right native output.
Re:Ask HN: How to Build an iPhone App in 2020?
by jamil7 on Saturday September 12, 2020 @09:02AM
(#24452096)
I second this. SwiftUI 2.0 is nearly out and it's a huge improvement and far easier, faster and more enjoyable than React Native. Swift itself is one of the more productive languages around IMO and it can be learned gradually, it's a complex language but you can be productive using just a subset of it. Open XCode, select a starter template and away you go, no fiddling with npm dependencies or a bunch of cocoapods and objc bridging code.
I've prototyped apps with React Native, and it was a dependency nightmare. More time was spent researching and hacking in fixes and dealing with upgrading the app to the latest version than actually building the app.
In contrast, we have an iOS app that was build 11 years ago, and it still runs flawlessly on the latest iOS version. Apple supports their environment, whereas, in ReactNative, even minor versions introduce breaking changes.
Hybrid mobile solutions are a nightmare, unless you're building a basic crud app that doesn't interact with the hardware on the phone. But at that point, just build a solid mobile web applications.