I would love to see some discussion around this as well. I have been playing with Apache Corodova and Windows 10 SDK lately and they look very promising. Being a web developer, I found them to be easy to get started.
Are there complex apps built using phonegap/swift/cordova? What are the limitations? I know Facebook tried with a 'web app' approach and reverted back to native solution. But that was years ago.
Using Cordova, you will always be behind any and all Mobile Safari WebKit et al bugs. This not a big deal when pushing layout around a webpage, but it can be crippling for app development as the app grows in complexity and you crave native-quality interactions. Mobile Safari's Webkit implementation has a staggering list of severe bugs. Developing under it can become a nightmare of hacks and backpedaling. Been working on Cordova nearly full time for two years now. So much wasted time. React Native is a big deal, and is very different.
> This not a big deal when pushing layout around a webpage,
> but it can be crippling for app development as the app
> grows in complexity and you crave native-quality
> interactions
Even on the fastest phones, web-based (including wrapped web components) simply don't offer the native experience. They come close, but there's always a slight but perceptible performance difference; and often a visual difference depending on what you're using.
I realize people really like the theoretical write-once behavior that you get for simple apps when using a javascript platform, but I've been waiting for years for web-based interactions to provide native quality - and I begin to suspect we'll never get there.
If you want native-quality interactions, the only solution is a native application and not common tooling via a javascript layer that runs atop the already not-as-performant-for-UI browser level. This makes your life harder as a developer, but gives your users the best possible experience for their platform.
Alternatively, if you're willing to give your users a good-but-less-than-native-quality experience, that's the niche filled by those tools.
I used to think same way, but 99% of your user won’t feel that way.
My hacker news app is a hybrid app. Available on iOS/Android/Windows/Mac and web, and I harldy see any one compalining about not being native.
There are some legit issues and peole think only way to fix is go native. Only reason I have not fixed those issues because I don’t have time, or I don’t use that functinality.
I use the app on Android and it's the best HN app on Android but at times it is obvious that it is not native and it has some issues as you said. What I have encountered are
1. I get an error message "Unable to load xxxx" at times (forgot the exact message) and the app closes.
2. If I switch between article/comments it always reloads
3. At times clicking on the comments icon doesn't work when you are in article mode.
4. I can't long press on links in comments to share it to browser/pocket etc
Compared to reddit apps like Relay, the HN app does feel much more basic.
> Even on the fastest phones, web-based (including wrapped web components) simply don't offer the native experience. They come close, but there's always a slight but perceptible performance difference
Honestly I used to believe this, but not after the release of the iPhone 5 and 6. Though there is no perceptible difference, it takes a lot of work to mimic the UI in terms of animations, opacity, and response actions, so most apps just use the default web technology which include things like a built-in 300ms delay, no response to clicking a link, etc.
Speaking as a web developer, this is sad, but true.
However, what's even sadder to me is the fact this continues to be true despite the fact that, believe it or not, the web has been the platform where most of the innovation in UI development paradigms has been taking place in the past few years. And I don't just mean in terms of the sheer number of new things coming out.
The web community pioneered UI development paradigms involving functional programming techniques and immutable data, and have brought its benefits to other platforms (through projects like React Native). I personally would never want to go back to the old way of building UIs. And I suspect I'll feel the same way about client-centric data fetching when I get to try out Relay/GraphQL, Falcor, Om Next, etc in production.
I really want Firefox OS to be successful for this exact reason. I don't want to have to make compromises between the best experience for my users and the best experience for myself as a developer. With a platform that makes web the native UI technology, we shouldn't have to make this compromise in theory, but Firefox OS's execution thus far has left much to be desired.
As someone with lots of native UI experience, that has to occasionally support web projects, the web is just plain clunky and playing catch up with the RAD tooling we enjoy since the mid-90 on native platforms.
I was mostly referring to development paradigms and methodology in my original post, but in terms of tooling, I personally haven't see any tooling on the native side even approach the increased productivity provided by the instantaneous feedback loops that countless hot-reload implementations can offer for the web.
I was not aware of this, so thanks for bringing it up.
It's a pretty amazing technical feat that this works at all, but I have a hard time imagining this would work well in practice for changes to anything other than maybe method bodies and templates though. Java's style of object orientation generally means there's plenty of tight-coupling between application state and operations on the application state, which would probably make life very difficult for any hot-reload implementation.
But regardless, it does exist and apparently works well for a lot of people. It looks like I was just ignorant when it comes to native tooling.
I've done similar with inotify (dnotify before that) and Python now for over a decade, and it is an interface than can automate anything. I use it with doc generators also.
I believe I used something similar called fam in the 90's but that may have only been on SGI.
Filesystem watching is only part of the equation though. Live reload has been available for the web and various other platforms for a long time, but the traditional approach to live reloading does not preserve application state.
These new hot reload implementation allows your app to be reloaded with your new changes without affecting the state of the application, and is not practical unless your application has been developed with a focus on functional techniques and careful management of application state.
This probably doesn't sound like a significant difference, but in practice, it is a huge boost to productivity, especially in a non-trivial app where reloading the entire app and then reproducing the app state manually with every file change can become quite tedious.
That's why Common Lisp / CLOS has functionality like
* CHANGE-CLASS (change the class of an object to a different class),
* update-instance-for-different-class (updating the object after a class change, one can provide methods which will be lazily called when needed),
* update-instance-for-redefined-class (updating the object after redefining a class, one can provide methods which will be lazily called when needed),
* LOAD (load source or machine code),
* EVAL (eval expressions)
* COMPILE (compile code in memory to memory), ...
One then always develops with a live application. Classes and objects can be updated in-place...
Not directly, mostly because I haven't done that much work in any language where you can do that. But I have had that kind of experience when trying to figure out what Ruby code is actually being run somewhere. I may be heading that way with C#, with the occasional overuse of dynamic and reflection.
Yes, Smalltalk and Common Lisp environments probably did offer similar experiences.
Tooling for web development has probably been heavily inspired by the tooling available for CL and Smalltalk, but I don't think it's fair to say it's still playing catch up. The tooling ecosystem for the web has long since caught up to the best native ever had to offer, and is now advancing the state of the art faster than any other tooling ecosystem out there today.
I was pleasantly surprised that the latest Chrome for Android delivers push notifications for Facebook due to a new W3C API, and Facebook's mobile web interface has been in good shape for some time, so right now Facebook's native app is completely optional. Which is a good thing, given how many permissions Facebook's app requires. Apparently this was announced back in April, but I just noticed it, due to Facebook being updated: http://blog.chromium.org/2015/04/reaching-and-re-engaging-us...
Along with other things such as the app manifest, Chrome on Android is leading the pack in terms of making the mobile web feel native. Previously this title belonged to iOS Safari, unfortunately Apple dropped the ball a long time ago.
I've been a long time Firefox user and I'm using Firefox on Android as well. But I do think they could do a better job, I mean I'm all for Firefox OS and what that means for Mozilla, but I feel their Android effort is subpar and that's a shame, given that Android is the modern Windows and there's plenty of room for Firefox on it. I mean right now Firefox is the only app I have that wasn't updated for the material design guidelines and they didn't even try to fake it. And that would be OK, but I've been waiting for things to get fixed ever since forever, like the Add to Homescreen functionality which is completely broken.
But anyway, people that bemoan web interfaces are usually ignorant of present day web interfaces that people use.
You can't name an email client that's more usable than GMail's web interface. And surprisingly FastMail on a mobile browser is almost as usable as native GMail, being all web. Facebook and Google Maps are 2 other example of having awesome mobile web interfaces. Of course, people focus on shiny rather than utility. But I don't care how usable or shiny your iMessenger or your FaceTime is, because I don't own an iOS device, not anymore. And your native app might be great, but if it doesn't have a web presence, I personally don't care much about it because I change devices often.
I disagree... They've removed functionality from the mobile web interface. Specifically, I'm unable to tag friends when sharing a post. When I share a video link (youtube, etc) it no longer creates a thumbnail or embeds the link as it does on desktop web. I'm unable to tag friends inside new/shared posts, only in comments.
I won't use the full client because it eats my battery, and they separated the messenger interface requiring yet another app with battery eating features.
I don't know about React Native, but Telerik's open source project NativeScript promises to always have 0 day support of all native platform features since it's reflecting over the native platform's libraries to expose to its own API.
React Native and NativeScript seem to have all the upside of Cordova (transference of web dev skills to native platforms) with none of the downsides (lag in new OS feature implementation, webview wrapped apps), I wonder if Cordova's days of relevance are numbered.
Sworkit was supposed to be an example of a complex app for ionic, not sure what else is out there. I've used that app and can say it seems pretty solid (no crashing, locking up my phone, etc.)
Are there complex apps built using phonegap/swift/cordova? What are the limitations? I know Facebook tried with a 'web app' approach and reverted back to native solution. But that was years ago.