It doesn’t really matter what can be done natively versus in a browser. For many folks, apps are the internet. This take is very developer-centric but it doesn’t account for the real world. Many people prefer using apps, especially middle-age to older demographics. That’s what our analytics say at least.

Maybe it's a cultural thing the in parts of the world where iPhones are common?

I Androidland I mostly see websites pushing user to use apps, and users not using the apps because they're functionally identical to the website except they ceaselessly spam you with irrelevant notifications. Like the google app store feels cheap like a bargain bin, I don't think anyone expects to find anything serious in there.

My perspective, from watching local (German) politics, is that business owners and the heads of government offices are who demand apps. They appear to think that to be hip and up-to-date, you need to have an app. (Possibly because that gives them an avenue to later spam people with notifications, though I would be surprised if they think that far.)

Agree 100%, which is why I wrote "In these cases it's often a lot easier to just build a Progressive Web App for Android (Google let's you put PWAs directly in the Play Store), and wrap that with a thin native wrapper for iOS."

In other words, these browser-tech-based apps show up in the app stores like any other app.

The experience of said apps just doesn’t hold a candle to RN or native apps. People can tell the difference, for all but your sort of back office type apps you’ll want native views.

Completely disagree. For one, there are tons of native apps that are essentially of these "back office-type" styles. Think banking apps, most airline and hotel membership apps, real estate apps, etc. It's not hard (or I guess not harder than native) to make these apps look great using web technologies.

If you really do need the "slickness" of native apps, I wholeheartedly agree, go native, and use the native frameworks to do so.

The reason I don't like React Native much is that it occupies a "weird middle ground" - if you need the benefits of native, it's usually easier with less headaches to just go native (and big companies have announced ditching React Native due to this reason), but if you want to go cross-platform, there are other technologies that work better IMO.

Sounds like you sort of agree, given you agree with my back office caveat. Sure it's some percent, maybe even a third of apps that could get by with that, but it's far from the majority.

I can point to a ton of RN apps that have incredible UX and surprisingly nice animations/interactivity, with what I'd argue is much easier to work with codebases. Maybe I'm biased, but the Uniswap app is really nicely done with all sorts of native views. They shipped the Android version of their app in just a few months, sharing 95% of the code with iOS.

True, but the nice thing is now PWAs can be in the app store and indistinguishable from apps.

> For many folks, apps are the internet.

It's a shame a duopoly controls one of the most important functions of modern society. Controls it, taxes it, prevents you from having a direct relationship with your customers ...

Egregious anti-trust.

> One of the big "aha" moments I had was a couple years ago when I was trying out Stripe's Identity product, which lets you take a selfie and a picture of your ID for identity verification purposes. It's pretty amazing how Stripe was able to do the full image analysis (i.e. edge detection when you take a picture of your ID) solely with browser APIs.

Do you have any details on that Stripe app? I've found the browser camera handling lacking on mobile if you want to overlay it with a "position the subject here" rectangle, or display instructions alongside, or detect QR codes as well as other subjects. I'd like this to be an out-of-date view. I've been considering React Native for the next version, using https://github.com/mrousavy/react-native-vision-camera as it seems much more feature complete.

I haven't looked under the covers much to see how it works, but you can try it out at https://identity.stripedemos.com/

"and wrap that with a thin native wrapper for iOS", how does that work? I hope iOS browser and apple apps store can support PWA but that's unlikely, if a think-native-wrapper can get browser-api working for iOS that will be wonderful.

The two options you have are Cordova and Capacitor. They do exactly that, and let you use native APIs if the browser doesn't serve your needs.

A surprising amount of apps on the app store were built like that.

Agree. If you carefully program something without tons of crap 3rd party libs in something like SolidJS im sure you could get it “native feeling” too

I’ll add I’ve worked on large scale RN apps used by millions per month. And the performance is awful. In fact I don’t think it would be possibly to make an advanced price chart like Tradingview for example, which runs perfectly well on a mobile.