Really curious as to how Flutter (and Xamarin, NativeScript, Ionic, Vue-based write-once frameworks, etc.) can overcome the difficulties expressed in this piece.
At the risk of being flippant, few companies are building major consumer mobile apps like Airbnb (100 mobile devs is massive compared to the rest of the market), and many are building data-driven business apps. That, or they don’t have the history of native app dev so they don’t have existing native engineers or apps. So while most of the technologies mentioned above wouldn’t work for Airbnb, they work great for a huge chunk of the market. At Ionic we work with teams every day that are meeting their mobile goals with our tech, so we don’t live or die by what works for Airbnb or not.
My guess is that Flutter will conquer the majority of data-driven business apps, since it is the closest multi-platform mobile framework to native code.
Flutter's approach is more like "similar UI and UX in all platforms" so I don't think that you need to write native code that much compared to RN. Also, it uses Dart seems to be a better fit for them compared to JS (static typing, better syntax etc.).
Me too. Last time I played with Ionic it was still mostly wrapped webviews though. And Vue-native is actually the worst. It transpiles Vue code into React Native code that then gets sent across the bridge to native apis.
Check out the landing page at https://vue-native.io/ at the bottom, "Compiles to React Native". It's important to note that "Vue Native" isn't officially endorsed by Vue.js.
I've tried pretty hard to get into RN with a few hobby projects and I've given up. I'm wondering if PWAs are the way forward for the average data driven mobile app.
I would say they can be, depends on how they evolve.
On Windows they have access to the native APIs if signed and delivered via the store, as Microsoft is building on JavaScript development story they introduced with WinRT.
