The same has been said for Electron on desktop for years, but look at how VS Code is probably the top editor in use on desktop platforms, and even more demanding audience, like developers, don't really care that it's non-native.
It’s easier to do it via their website.
It is perfectly possible to build a poor app in any language.
Non-standard UI elements is something I don't personally care about. Some people do, but I think this is an issue that is often overstated (or perhaps rather overestimated as a factor) by platform enthusiasts.
What does matter a great deal to me though is launch speed and battery usage. Mobile apps are often used for short periods of time. They must launch instantly. And battery is the scarcest resource in mobile computing.
Nobody will voluntarily use an app that is slow to launch and shows up at the top of the battery usage table in spite of only having been in use for a few minutes.
As a developer, these are the issues I would like to learn more about in respect of any new cross-platform technologies.
100% this. Cross platform frameworks will always fall into a weird uncanny valley where there are just things that are subtly off about apps made with them. Most of the user base may not be able to pinpoint exactly what's wrong with such apps, but I believe they still notice on some level.
The path to sucess is a very tortuous one full of victims.
Users will of course notice and care. It's just they are not versed in shitty tech to properly articulate what they notice.
So every time a user says "the app is broken/slow/hard to use/loses data/can't update data etc." quite often it's because it's some shitty wrapper on top of a shitty "web app".
Also do Dart/Flutter development along side it and.... they (D/F) just feel so damn verbose and messy by comparison.
edit: I can also mirror what the author of the article mentions. Any update in OS versions or the Flutter framework can seriously cripple some of the packages that you'll need to use in order to make a functioning application. Massive time will be spent hunting down the weirdest issues.
But to be fair, that can also happen on the native side. They are usually just much easier to find and fix.
So Clubhouse 'succeeded' on native this then before every single competitor copied them to the point where everyone has abandoned it? At what cost?
It didn't stop Discord from copying them (which that is in React Native). It also seems that Discord is the prime example that proved how slow Clubhouse was to catch up in the first place without an Android app available at the time for their entire product.
As soon as the Clubhouse Android app released, it was already too late.
The expectation with apps these days is to release on both platforms from day 1 and Clubhouse was still too busy writing their Android app a year after releasing their iOS app, meaning they were too slow to compete against everyone else.
As soon as that was finished with the invite system removed, everyone already left for Twitter Spaces or Discord Stages.
After some exploration phase, it seems the main use case settled to just semi-interactive podcasting. Which is something that Twitter did take over. But my guess is this is just some 5% of the initial traffic and even Twitter could live without that probably.
also everything around navigation is trouble - ios has those large headers that shrink down once you start scrolling. For a long time this was not possible in RN, not sure it finally is.
iOS 15 also uses modals quite a lot more than previous versions. Including modals on top of modals. Also impossible in RN up until recently, don't know current status.
While the navigation-related differences might not be consciously picked up by normal users, it may be subconsciously felt - the app doesn't feel right and user doesn't know why.