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A comment on Verbz: Voice-based messaging. Parent comment

Re:Verbz: Voice-based messaging by azinman2 on Friday February 26, 2021 @12:23AM (#26271626)
This is an age old argument. However, the evidence is in favor of platform specific. Most big companies that have built big products using cross platform toolkits (e.g. Facebook) usually end up reversing this decision and building with native APIs in the end. You get better integration, which often has performance, debugging, UI, and feature importance that ends up winning out.

Looking at their app I don't see it as a generic thing at all. They're aiming for consumer-oriented UX... unless you're doing something 100% custom and wild, then you will look out of place on your respective platform using generic toolkits.... or you'll typically have to re-invent the wheel for each platform in some non-native toolkit.

They're also on iOS first. IMHO, UIKit (and soon SwiftUI) is the best mobile development toolkit out there, including generic solutions.

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Re:Verbz: Voice-based messaging by underwater on Friday February 26, 2021 @07:14AM (#26274000)
Literally none of that stuff needs a platform specific framework and toolchain. I'm not arguing that F web views, Flutter or React Native would have been better. I'm arguing that the fact that there isn't a good cross platform solution is evidence the ecosystem is messed up.

FWIW the Facebook example is not necessarily generalisable. The original Facebook app was a thin wrapper around the existing mobile web site. It was a leaky and poorly designed abstraction that was fundamentally flawed.

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Re:Verbz: Voice-based messaging by azinman2 on Friday February 26, 2021 @12:07PM (#26277034)
Facebook used react native for a while, which isn’t a web view wrapper, and then went away from that towards native: https://engineering.fb.com/2020/03/02/data-infrastructure/me...

So far the only actual success I’ve seen is electron on the desktop, and in that world everyone complains how apps use huge amounts of RAM.

There’s only one true success for a generic solution across all platforms: the web. Because it doesn’t pretend to integrate natively, nor depend on native APIs. But with it will always come limitations that cannot be avoided.

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