alt Hacker NewsYes, these cross platform frameworks speed up developing easy and boring things but actively gets in the way the moment you venture out for more esoteric platform-specific features. Overall time savings is questionable, especially in the AI age where you get a lot more speedup for the easy and boring things with better documentation and more training corpus. Not recommended (from someone who made the switch back to separate native codebases), unless your app can basically be a web app anyway.
Yes building a native app has fewer layers of abstraction and often has better DX than building with a cross-platform framework where you have to work around bugs that inevitably exist in the framework.
Cross-platform frameworks I find are more about making sure that your apps stay consistent across platforms over time as they are maintained. Features land on all platforms at the same time.
I worked on a product that had been around a long time and had a separate macOS, windows, iOS, android, and web apps. It was a big a big shit-show when product leadership wanted to make large scale changes across all platforms in unison. For that product though it really did have to be native to each platform and I don't think any cross platform framework could have worked for that particular product.
Having worked with both native apps & cross-platform frameworks, I do think there is value in cross-platform frameworks as long as the framework allows you to drop down to native platform specific code easily where needed.
When it comes to mobile, I think that React Native has some serious benefits:
- Fast refresh: incredible DX improvement to be able to just save a file and instantly see the behavior of your app update without rebuilding and reinstalling. - Server-driven UI via React Server Components (still experimental): Companies like AirBnB spend a ton of engineering effort to build their own bespoke server-driven UI frameworks. Expo Router is bringing React Server Components to native apps. - Automatic deep linking: If you also ship your app for the web using Expo Web & Expo Router, then all your links work perfectly as deep links into your app because your web app and your native app have the exact same routing. If you use next.js with solito for your web app instead of Expo Router, you can also keep your web app in lock-step with your native app without having to use Expo Router for your web app. - Over the Air Updates: You can ship changes to your apps instantly without app store review. - Can drop down to native easily: These days you can easily build an expo module or if you need really high performance build a nitro module and leverage the native platform APIs where you really need it. I mean look at react-native-vision-camera, it's so much easier to use than the native camera APIs. - LLMs are way better at react than they are at swift & kotlin development.
If I wanted to build the next TikTok though I'd 100% go full native.