Sharing a common code base between your Android and iOS applications might seem to make a lot of business sense, especially from a time an cost perspective. But before you make the decision to go non-native, be aware of what you might be getting into. This candid discussion with Alex Bush and Andrew Rohn on Inside iOS dev is quite insightful. TLDR: Don’t use JavaScript, and React Native might be the latest buzzword, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea. And if you really want to go the cross-platform route, Kotlin might actually be the best tool for the job.
Running into problems with shared cross platform code in JavaScript
The discussion reminds me of issues we faced when I first took over Envolve Peoplecare’s mobile code bases. They had a hybrid app, partly Ionic, and a whole lot of content coming through a web view. A huge percentage of the bugs were JavaScript related. It’s true, debugging JavaScript in an iOS app is a royal pain…you have to use Safari to debug. It’s a huge disconnect from the normal, native development lifecycle. So yes, a non-native approach might give you some initial momentum, but when problems arise it becomes very problematic to fix things.
(featured image by @behaviorgap)
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