This is a nit, but there's a pretty big difference between refactoring and rearchitecting.
If you plan for an eventual migration of the app from a cross-platform toolkit to native, then often you're committing to a significant rewrite of the app. This means either you dedicate a team to the rewrite or you stop adding features while it gets rewritten.
Plus it will take a while for the native version to get feature parity with the cross-platform version, and you typically can't roll out the native version until you have parity.
I'm sure there are tools and strategies for getting this right, but I've seen this basically kill startups.
> “I'm sure there are tools and strategies for getting this right, but I've seen this basically kill startups.”
Well if they're doing it like that, it's indeed not much better than hara-kiri. There are better ways :)
How you do it is incrementally, avoiding too-major changes at once, and progressively moving from codebase A (cross-platform framework) towards codebase B (new native thing). But it happens at the integration level, i.e. you build with increasingly more % from B, but during the whole A->B transition it'll be a hybrid build.
E.g. part Flutter / part native.
1. You begin with "let's take camera stuff out of Flutter and re-implement our related features using native APIs": this instantly makes two apps (iOS, Android) with 90-99% code in common, just a fork to handle camera APIs separately (by the way, the state of API affairs often forced you to do this to some extent for any non-trivial use-case; I'd wager it used to be the state of most feature-rich apps in the 2010s).
2. Then you proceed with another component of your app. Rinse and repeat until you've got 90% from B and the remaining stuff is structural.
3. All that remains is to remove Flutter entirely from the equation and rewrite your core app logic: what glues all of the above components together; all of which at that stage are already rewritten for native and tested independently (critical to your success).
Along the way you never truly break UX, it's more of a classic "ongoing development" thing with details changing here and there, and hopefully better UX each step since your move to native must be motivated by something worth it for the client-side (otherwise it's likely your server API model that needs refactoring).
That's how the now-default-consensual approach to how you change stacks without breaking UX, nor your company. Full rewrites on wholly new tech is just asking for cataclysm: you literally do that to yourself, to your own code and users. It's also the only reasonable way I know for small teams, one-man shows, etc.
You're right, I didn't use the correct terminology and I appreciate the correction.
On the other hand, using information from Facebook themselves (creators of React Native), the cross-platform solution seems to be able to scale pretty darn well [1]. Facebook, Instagram, Bloomberg, Skype, Walmart, Uber... these are some pretty big names with some pretty big audiences. If React Native can get your company from a startup to the size of any of these companies, I'd say you're doing pretty well on the technology front.
Kind of like how Twitter had to do a major rewrite from Rails, but Rails got them to the point where they needed that rewrite.
I think you'd indeed have to look at more demanding applications, more "bleeding edge" stuff computationally: 3D gaming is probably as good a candidate as ever, maybe some in-app AI workflows, idk. Truth is, I know how to bring a desktop/server to its knees because there are valid use-cases for that, but on mobile I struggle to find many examples indeed. I guess any heavy data crunching app might fit the bill, but when don't you run that remotely? On-premises offline pro apps maybe, like tools for e.g. plumbers and electricians? All of that stuff is in embedded afaik. Dedicated devices, rugged cases, it's a whole other market/target.
So cross-platform solutions on mobile indeed seem to fit most-if-not-all of the 'normal' use-cases, assuming there's server resource available. The Twitter/Rails example is one perfect illustration, and there are many such examples throughout big names we know today.
The issues you tend to run into with mobile is that you have to either create so many shim layers to use native app features or resort to 3rd party solutions. And there are loads of examples (speaking for iOS here):
1. JSON parsing
2. Network calls
3. Background downloading
4. Notifications
5. Camera access
6. Password/contact/code auto fill
7. VoiceOver
8. Web Views
9. JavaScript bridging
10. Encryption
11. And many more
Almost every app needs some combination of those and in some of these cases you’re forced to use a native solution. What ends up happening is that a significant amount of developer resources gets wasted bridging many of these things with massive bug logs to go with them. It’s why at this point I refuse to do anything but native in my career.
> “It’s why at this point I refuse to do anything but native in my career.”
Point well taken! If I may ask, would you say that
1. it's a problem inherent to developing on mobile (whatever the underlying reasons, hardware iterations, idk), and that OS APIs are indeed trying to solve as best they can (it's just a hard problem),
or rather
2. that it's a problem somehow created by OS vendors of their own volition? (a.k.a "evil microsoft walled garden", cue "Apple's take on that" and Google's similar moves for Android and we think Fuschia) In essence a business-driven reality.
I actually don't care about "evil" (hence the wording, it's funny) when it's just business strategy; my deeper question is really about the problem space.
Like, is this forever (native versus cross on a fast-iterating platform), is this industrial politics or technical limitations, could some other platform do it "better" (thinking of SailfishOS, or the Linux phones like the Pine project etc.)
If you plan for an eventual migration of the app from a cross-platform toolkit to native, then often you're committing to a significant rewrite of the app. This means either you dedicate a team to the rewrite or you stop adding features while it gets rewritten.
Plus it will take a while for the native version to get feature parity with the cross-platform version, and you typically can't roll out the native version until you have parity.
I'm sure there are tools and strategies for getting this right, but I've seen this basically kill startups.