Ask HN: Easiest Route to a Mobile App?

1 points by rlawson ↗ HN
Ok so I am primarily a backend dev but doing some pro-bono work with a non-profit. They need a mobile app in the app stores. I could easily do a mobile web app with Django but it has to be a "real" app. So what is my best bet here? Ionic + Vue or React or Angular, React native, Cordova - or something I haven't even heard of? I have 20+ yrs in industry, primarily Java/Python. Can of course do js just don't love it. This is lunchtime and evening work so needs to be enjoyable but also get most results with least effort. All advice appreciated.

4 comments

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I would say that flutter is an emerging technology. Cross platform, it runs natively on ios and android plus a bonus of the browser and desktop.

https://flutter.dev/

And additionally, Flet (basically a Flutter wrapper) if you know Python

https://flet.dev

Thanks - I have been keeping an eye on flet. I think it still is a way from being ready for prod mobile app but happy to see it progress.
>most results with least effort I would ask chatGPT. I'm a C#/Unity guy that was able to clobber together a Linux nginx server to host a pre-made php forum (vichan).

One big bugbear was that line numbers wouldn't show in emacs, though my init.el was configured to show line numbers in all programming langs. I needed php-s or some nonsense that chatGPT acknowledged as correct when I told it (after resorting to Google->Stack Overflow), but for a while it was insisting on an outdated emacs package that did not add line numbers to php files.