Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by nwienert 1095 days ago
A lot of people saying it doesn’t exist or work, but as the creator of Tamagui, I have to vouch for it. I think it works pretty amazingly, and we have some really beautiful apps in every App Store (plus web).
4 comments

Sorry but what you say just isn't possible. Especially with a browser-based cross-platform solution, you're gonna pay on the performance and native integration front.

What you built looks nice and I'm sure it works well for many classes of apps though.

React Native renders to native views on iOS, Android, Windows and Mac!
It certainly exists/works, but is it productive? With my time using Tamagui I would go with no.

There are just so many traps everywhere. 99% of it isn't your fault, just the name of the fragile RN game. Install another package here to handle one use case on one platform, avoid this component on one platform because RN doesn't support this thing, entire blocks of very simple styles commented out due to performance cost. List goes on. It's a never-ending game of your codebase feeling horribly fragile, and that's if you remain within the RN = Android and iOS realm. As soon as you start trying to get it to be truly cross platform with desktop apps - endless nightmares.

I so desperately want cross-platform development to feel as smooth as people proclaim, but it's really like playing russian roulette with every new component added. At the end, you question if it was really worth it due to how much you've had to rewrite anyways. You become sort of delirious after working on a project that uses such solutions, wondering if you traded user experience for developer experience and wound up messing both up in the long run.

Beautiful site/docs though.

Good to hear about your experience, and we’ve steadily improved the onboarding costs. Also have a new starter kit coming soon that goes all in on batteries included.

When did you last try it? Because it’s improved dramatically since January.

But of course you have to compare it to the alternatives.

Aka have you tried to build a SwiftUI app? There’s endless problems. And then you have to rewrite your whole app three times.

Building any app will leave you delirious, but I’ve found myself far more productive in React Native than the alternatives - and I’ve tried them. I would happily challenge anyone to ship a cross platform app using their framework of choice and compare on time to ship and ultimate UX. I think there’s a clear winner.

Hey that looks pretty cool! https://github.com/tamagui/tamagui
Do you have a link to an example iOS app built in Tamagui to check out?
The beta https://beta.aidungeon.com is pretty nice, not sure if the app is public yet or still on TestFlight.