[chris_nielsen]

Hello, author here. Congrats on having such a successful app.

Funnily enough, I actually wrote this post because if you had asked me about cross platform web apps 6 months ago I would have said the exact same thing you just said.

In 2014 I'd started an app using Ionic and actually ended up abandoning it and it killed the project. I was so frustrated. That's why I was shocked with this app (and yes it is small and pretty simple) actually worked really nicely being a react app bundled into a webview. It's crazy, I was just shocked.

Made me realize that cross platform web apps are a hell of a lot more capable today than I had thought.

And sure, maybe claiming native apps will die eventually is a pretty bold claim... But technology moves. And the direction it's going now, is in the direction of browsers becoming faster and more capable at a greater rate than user's desire for more elaborate UIs. Visual Basic and Java used to be the hottest tech you could have on your resume. Who knows what will be old fashioned and out of date in the future.

I don't normally make bold claims but I think I'll stick with this one and maybe in 5-10 years I can fish out this blog post to see if I'm right or not.

[null_object]

> Congrats on having such a successful app

Hi - Thanks I don't consider myself responsible for the overall success of the app, it's a big company.

I know really well about how 'tech moves' as my first developer career was based on advanced and deeply immersive ActionScript3 Flash apps - and the speed that died was a genuine warning to never be complacent that I'm still fully aware of even now.

But I'm not convinced that 'web-apps' are the universal panacea you seem to think they are.

To begin with, the apparent simplicity of your app (forgive me if I'm underestimating the complexity of any features you don't mention in the article) suggests to me something that could be built using SwiftUI in a couple of days.

For side projects or simple UI applications, SwiftUI is so fast to put together that it really outstrips the setup speed of any of the web frameworks I've used in the past. Simply learning a bit of Kotlin and/or teaming-up with one other Android developer (which in itself would be a great learning opportunity) means that you could develop native apps pretty much as quickly and easily as learning and implementing an Ionic app.

You also (both here and in the article) focus on "user's desire for more elaborate UIs" - but the emphasis in most apps is not an "elaborate UI" but speed, reliability, predictability and accessibility.

In my experience, native frameworks provide a better user-experience in all these areas.

[woojoo666]

Even if you learn SwiftUI, and get a Kotlin developer for Android, you'll still need a web developer for those who just want a web app. Notion, Spotify, Hulu, etc, all have web apps. Even Gmail still has a web app, albeit an extremely poor one, which goes to show how much work multi-platform support is. The benefit of frameworks like Ionic is to support multiple platforms without having to maintain multiple codebases. So as the gap shrinks between native and web, it starts making more sense to just write a single web app

[ColonelPhantom]

Gmail's web app is "extremely poor"? I almost never experience any issues with it, and it's quite streamlined in my experience. It's not worse than the Android app (it's actually nicer, IMO, but that's probably in large part because it's on a big screen). It could be more responsive, but that's about it.

[woojoo666]

You're right, I was thinking of the web app, but then again most mobile web apps are lacking

[ColonelPhantom]

Ah, you mean the mobile web version. I agree, that is an absolute dumpster fire that looks like it hasn't been updated since 2009.

Not sure why though, probably just lack of interest from Google.

[calsy]

most are lacking what exactly?

[woojoo666]

Usability. One of the worst examples is Google docs, which is almost impossible to use on mobile

[mdp2021]

> And sure, maybe claiming native apps will die eventually is a pretty bold claim... But technology moves

But common sense does not.

Just do not forget that you are reasoning over a "market", a supposed large number of potential users - not "a norm, some universal rule". It is very normal to want one's tools work without networking.

[rimliu]

Native technology is also moving. SwiftUI is nice, React Native is horrible.

[BackBlast]

React Native has nothing to do with the work done by the author. He is using a browser based web view, React Native eschews the browser in favor of a JavaScript based custom native bridge. And I would agree that it's poor.

[BackBlast]

Have you considered making the site a PWA?

[teakettle42]

I don’t want to be wildly unkind, so I’ll keep it to this: your limited experience here is not sufficient basis to prognosticate on an entire industry.

[zasdffaa]

That was quite unnecessary.

I look for signs in posts of where the user is at and he said "I don't normally make bold claims but I think I'll stick with this one and maybe in 5-10 years I can fish out this blog post to see if I'm right or not" which is exactly the kind of thing that suggests a level of maturity (which = a willingness to be wrong and change one's mind and learn from experience) in the poster.

[noja]

That is wildly unkind though.

[teakettle42]

Noting that the evidence is insufficient basis for the claim is not unkind.

[michaelmarkell]

But saying “I don’t want to be wildly unkind” implies that there is something about the author and their claim that is deserving of meanness. I think that is an unkind thing to say.

[teakettle42]

That’s a fair point. I thought the context of “unkind” was already clear from the grandparent comment:

> This post makes very big claims based on a very basic application that doesn't seem to be much more than a few toggle buttons and a couple of animations thrown in, and some 'statistics' that don't appear to be based on any actual facts.