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Mobile Options

True native (Swift/Kotlin)

  • Pros
    • Best performance
    • Best API support
  • Cons
    • Completely separate code for iOS and Android
    • Two separate teams, double the complexity
    • Changes need app store review

React Native (JS)

  • Pros
    • All teams would use JS
    • Bigger cross-platform framework than Flutter
    • Most changes don’t need app store review (Expo)
  • Cons
    • Poor developer experience
    • “Always in beta”
    • Bugs which are very difficult to identify and fix

Flutter (Dart)

  • Pros
    • Truer native code
    • Better Dev experience (hot reload etc.)
  • Cons
    • Smaller community
    • Whole new language
    • Changes need app store review
    • Does not use native components (Skia Engine)

PWA (JS)

  • Pros
    • Single code base (literally the web app)
    • 100% design and function consistency between platforms
    • “Installs” to the desktop
    • Changes do NOT need app update
    • Smaller download size
    • Gives us time for cross-platform solutions like Flutter to mature
  • Cons
    • Push notifications (THEY DO WORK)
    • Performance isn’t as great (but this is more for intense animations or gaming)
    • Apple sucks (a few years behind the latest features, only really started adding in iOS 13)

Capacitor

  • Capacitor is really cool
  • “Like electron but for mobile apps”
  • Literally just drop into the react project and it works!

References