alt Hacker NewsModels have gotten a lot better at generating native iOS apps. The main appeal of RN was being able to leverage your web devs for mobile dev. that's what I did at my last company. And it's fine for a startup, but eventually you want dedicated native engineers bc each platform really deserves its own technical masters who can optimize for it.
But now that all code is generated, there's little upside to having an RN app... just start native. Your devs are barely going to be writing code anyway.
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You always still needed a specialist per-platform even if most of the code was RN or KMM[0]. But I agree - a thousand not-great mobile apps sprang from this idea.
[0] I always thought the best answer was something like KMM to do all the backend comms and local data model in a shared way, and then a bespoke UI building on what that shared code exposed.
This is true in a very real sense – models can help you build native apps very quickly, no question. But how do you keep them from drifting apart from one another as you add/change features or design? Right now, there isn't much tooling for this.
React Native's advantage of having a single source of truth for code hasn't quite gone away yet, imo.
> The main appeal of RN was being able to leverage your web devs for mobile dev.
There's nothing remarkable about the skill set of either party; the appeal here is re-use of code. how the labor markets itself is irrelevant
> The main appeal of RN was being able to leverage your web devs for mobile dev.
> But now that all code is generated, there's little upside to having an RN app... just start native. Your devs are barely going to be writing code anyway.
Are you saying:
- webdevs are now able to write and review native code because of AI (who cares if they don't really understand it); or,
- Because developers are more productive we can cut the number of webdevs and hire native engineers – same no. engineers, same output, but now native apps.
Why not:
Continue using RN but now and just enjoy being more productive? If productivity was the reason to pick RN, then enjoy it. It's not a bug.
Nobody is talking about the real advantage of RN: Being able to release to the App Store without having to go through a review. That's so massive. Getting a bug fix out to users instantly, sneaking in optimizations, etc..
Sure, you need a review to release native code changes, and you should probably get a review if you have big feature changes just for the sake of Apple not banning you. But in practice, it removes one of the biggest annoyances of developing for the App Store.