March 31, 2018

Before you decide to build a hybrid app, listen to this

Why - image courtesy of @behaviorgap

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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Fuad Kamal

With a background in biotechnology, Fuad began his career developing assays and cutting edge technologies around HIV research. From there he shifted into the bioinformatics arena, where he developed innovative information systems in Perl. He started playing with the Flash platform around the time Flash 4 was released, and later developed the flash interface for the Flight Information Display System (FIDS) that you see at pretty much every major airport around the world today. Fuad loves delving into new technologies and pushing technologies in novel directions. Currently he is focused on providing mobile strategy & development for the Health & Fitness markets. He is an iOS developer, teaches an Android & Kotlin college course, and is currently writing The Kotlin Book http://thekotlinbook.com. Fuad has often applied principals he learned from his study of the martial arts to mentoring others as well as taking a unique approach to problem solving. He has found that quite often, the barriers we set before us are more mental than anything else, and the key to overcoming them lies in understanding this concept.

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