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by troymc 4063 days ago
Where do you get the statistic that "most" HN folks are making native mobile apps? Are you sure it's not server-side software, or machine-independent code, or something else?

i.e. [citation needed]

Also, the reasons people make native mobile apps rather than hybrid apps (which run inside a mobile web-player component) are speed and reliability. Famously, Facebook switched from HTML5 to native for their iOS app:

https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/under-th...

1 comments

Maybe less so the case with HN but certainly the case. Just look at Product Hunt where nearly half of today's posts are mobile native apps. Facebook has since built and released React. I'm willing to bet Facebook will switch away from native again.
Facebook is building something they call React Native, which, as I understand it, lets you code an app using JavaScript and web stuff, but then it transforms all of that into native code that gets compiled to run on the various mobile operating systems. I think it's currently iOS-only. Facebook says they're already using it for multiple production apps, but I don't know which ones.

https://facebook.github.io/react-native/