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by paulbennett 4210 days ago
I agree with the second paragraph. It seems that we're constantly pushing to make developing mobile apps easier for people with a web front-end background, in doing so tying them into using a stack of frameworks that in my opinion is far enough removed from 'web' that it loses sight of the core advantage - that it is easier to learn and develop with than the 'native' alternatives.

I wonder if by the time you get to this stage you wouldn't be better off investing the time in actually learning the native languages and toolsets provided with them. I am also concerned about how much you would be tied into doing things the, in this case, Supersonic way. The scaffolding for example looks interesting, but is it actually useful in a real-world application?

I don't have experience with Supersonic, I do have experience with AngularJS + Cordova mobile apps (I built the front-end of the RuneScape Companion app) - and I think if I were faced with building a similar app again I would think very very carefully about investing time into learning a stack of frameworks such as this.

2 comments

This type product fits a specific niche. If you are a small team with a lot of web experience, no mobile experience, and only enough funds for one guy to work on your mobile app, then this might be a good choice. While there are some technologies that would need to be learned to build on this stack, it's meeting you half way as a web dev, so it will still be a lot faster than learning native dev from scratch. You will also save a lot of time by only coding for one platform instead of two.

A stack like this though may not be the best approach to maintain as the user base and dev team size grows, but it will get you off the ground with limited resources and time.

Couldn't have said it better...
It's still early in the development of mobile stacks. It might be a huge risk to use a completely new framework built on another framework right now but in a few years it might have evolved to the standard way of doing things. If they get the tooling and own code to a stable state where everything just works it might save a lot of developer time. Or it might be safer to just go with Cordova or similar and use any UI and JS framework you like (that is stable enough).