[afavour]

I’ve been dabbling in this space for a long time and I’ve become convinced there will be no good cross-platform mobile UI story. The UIs are too different for there to be a one size fits all solution.

(as an aside I really like Swift too and have been enjoying noodling around with it as a server language. Probably rarely a wise choice given that it isn’t their focus but there is some attention given: https://swift.org/server/)

[waboremo]

Seconding this. The cross platform experience has been so abysmal for so long, that I question whether the benefits of "easier to support" are even real considering the generally worse experience, longstanding bugs that are harder to nail down, and the added time of having to switch mental models between cross platform and the native code you're going to have to eventually write.

I'm at the point now where native apps are still back in heavy consideration, as it's far more straight forward to cascade launch your products on different platforms than it is to half-ass everywhere.

[criddell]

> there will be no good cross-platform mobile UI story

Generally (IMHO) there are no good cross-platform stories, mobile or otherwise with the notable exception of some game engines. The closest you can get is choosing the web browser as your platform and writing a web app (Electron).

If you want to make the best app you can, use the native toolkit directly or via a framework for your UI.

[koito17]

For web apps on desktop you're not even restricted to Electron anymore. Thanks to Tauri, I feel a lot more comfortable shipping web apps beyond the browser (and React Native) since I don't have to pay the cost of bundling Chromium and Node.js. The Rust ecosystem is large enough that any backend-related task I would use Node.js for has an equivalent in Rust.

[pjmlp]

We were never restricted to Electron.

There are browsers already installed, and MSHTML apps and XUL predate it for a decade.

[Delphiki]

> Probably rarely a wise choice

I think you'd be surprised! There are some big names using it at scale[1].

[1] https://youtu.be/Te0aCoenCMg?t=710

[wiseowise]

There’s a good cross platform mobile UI story, it’s called browser.

[afavour]

I believe in the superiority of the web in general, but absolutely not in UI.

[wiseowise]

Why?

[afavour]

It has an extreme lack of UI primitives. Look how seamlessly iOS native views transition to each other, the consistent navigation bar, the modal views, etc etc. There’s no equivalent of UITableView letting you render long lists efficiently.

Any equivalent of the above has to be hacked together using JS, which ties up the main thread and can never fully match the host OS.

[aflukasz]

Exactly.

At this point, the most straightforward technical road to cross platform UI seems to be building high level UI toolkit that runs on browser runtime (ONE specific browser run time), and "platforms" slowly integrating this runtime as their native and only behavior. Note that I say "most straightforward", not "easy".

Personally, I don't see any viable *business* road for this, but happy to read some fan fiction on that.

[danielvaughn]

Yep. The only real option is that each platform agrees to abide by a common protocol for describing GUIs. I don't see that happening.