Building a mobile app in 2020? Here’s what to look at

7 points by rebeldot 6y ago ↗ HN

Looking back at the past year from a technology perspective, all we can say is that 2020 should be at least as ground-breaking as 2019. But with a lot of technology trends & buzz words being promoted around, which one will you actually trust to lead the strategic direction of your next mobile app?

5 comments

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muzani 6y ago ↗

Doesn't really matter. You can always refactor later.

I'm still using Cordova. There are reasons to use Cordova. We'll phase it out for native later. Not Flutter or React Native, but actual native.

There has never really been a "best" technology. Some are faster. Some are safer. Some are cheaper. Some have nice curves early on and mess you up later on. Some are awesome for CRUD, not so great when your app relies on modifying camera or microphone data, or needs to be running in the background.

segmondy 6y ago ↗

For the last 3 yrs, I have used javascript. Ionic (angular/typescript) and if I need native functionality I'll jump down with Cordova plugins.

raztogt21 6y ago ↗

Been using React Native + Expo, and it impressed me. I think React Native would be around for a couple of years, some huge companies as Shopify[0] are now adopting it.

[0] https://engineering.shopify.com/blogs/engineering/react-nati...

gt565k 6y ago ↗

Meh, we tried to build an offline first mobile app with react native. Unfortunately, by the time our prototype was done we had to update react native 3-4 times and had major breaking changes with external libraries / plugins we used.

At the end, we decided we didn't need to be cross-platform and went iOS Swift UI native.

So much better!

I'm not sure how RN is today, but 6 months ago it was a clusterfuck of constant breaking changes with every minor version update. It just wasn't worth the headache of spending days to update and fix everything while still developing an application and trying to stay up to date. Not to mention you were at the mercy of 3rd party library's and their maintainers any time you want to update your version. It's a dependency nightmare for an app with a little bit of complexity..

taway555 6y ago ↗

native, all the way. launch on one platform. get traction? fine, scale to multiple platforms and at that time evaluate whether you should move to a cross platform framework (i.e. react)