One codebase sounds great but I always feel devs try to ignore that there just are significant differences between platforms that you must address if you want a well integrated app. Writing separate codebases in native iOS, Android, and web has a huge amount of waste but you can achieve higher quality and os integration, writing react native and react on web means you get just 2 codebases and higher dev productivity but at the cost of pain in libraries which typically also means less native integration, the solution proposed here means 1 codebase and even less native integration. If it is right for you great but like everything it is tradeoffs, pick your poison.
Agreed. Although the economic reality is that it’s borderline impossible for a company to develop a cross-platform native product unless they have significant amounts of money. Cross-platform is a terrible necessity to that end.
Eh. Not sure I agree, unless you mean taking a non-native already made react bit and try to turn it into RN.. that is far harder and does require lots of money.
too many people don't realize just how non-portable react code can be.
No I mean building a product that works on web, android, and iOS, and has a native experience on all platforms. It’s hard enough to find a good web dev, but it’s far harder to find good iOS and Android devs. It’s a very large and expensive endeavor.
As somebody who did it several times in multiple companies, it's not as hard as it looks. Usually you don't want to replicate your complete frontend experience, only the user facing part (and admin panel/etc can be a lot of product). Also things like notifications, emails, etc are all usually dispatched from your backend.
So in a lot of cases having just 1 engineer per each mobile platform would be enough. And if you spend say 3 years building backend + web frontent, it would take about 6 months for each to replicate user facing experience on mobile. With current average global quality engineering cost of 70k/year, this means it only costs about $70k total to ship both mobile apps.
There are many ways to do it less efficiently, but this is my personal experience (as a CEO, EM and also iOS engineer in different setups) and it's really achievable.
It is definitely a challenge, but as prev EM / hiring manager of many iOS / Android devs it certainly isn't impossible. Not sure about large and expensive. Surprisingly most of my best devs were all inbound, not via recruiters. Felt recruiters usually wasted our time and small teams of native devs can get a lot more done than web teams (at least so it seems based on my subjective exp).
My previous company had probably well over a dozen web engineers and then for our mobile side we had a total of 3, myself included. We also often had to adapt designs ourselves and work with product to fix flows for native. But we still managed to keep up with web.
edit: and not "keep up with web" in the we are working 80 hour weeks type thing, very normal working hours, 9-5. Possibly more normal than the web team.
Besides companies, there are also solo web developers working on cross-platform apps. It opens up mobile/desktop app development to them. Learning new languages and platforms to create native apps might simply not be an option. And users benefit from more apps on the app store, more options for them.
On the other hand, I have used some web apps that, when I "Install as an app" on Android, work pretty well.
Sure, there are a couple of annoyances mostly related to notifications and how it works when switching between apps, but these are quite minor parts of the app - sure, they're annoying and need to be fixed but it's also important to acknowledge that the other 99% of the app was running correctly and with decent performance on my mid range phone. I think that the remaining issues, including perform, are fixable and will be fixed over the next few years.
You might not write one fully unified code base but you'll at least be able to use 99.9% of the same code with just a little bit of glue on top to make user accounts and notifications work on other platforms.
The thing is that most paying customers are most often on iOS, so target that experience while using react native and you will get some Android users for free. Android users are less likely to pay anyway.
