I’m primarily a web developer that’s long been interested in native mobile environments and after trying out many of these cross platform frameworks (all the way back to Appcelerator for those who remember!) my conclusion always ends up that they’re almost always a bad idea. The experience is inferior to native, it’s full of compromises to make cross platform work and you’re at the mercy of a company standing between you and the underlying mobile OS.
My advice these days is to go in one of two directions:
- make a progressive web app. No, it’s not a native experience. But if your priority is cross platform then this is cross platform. Service Workers etc make it a ton more paletable than it was back in the day.
- make native UI and code your business logic in some kind of shared layer (Rust, Go, Kotlin Multiplatform). Native UI has come a long way too, as someone who speaks webdev I find SwiftUI and Jetpack Compose to be very grokkable compared to their predecessors, a lot like React if you squint a little.
My advice these days is to go in one of two directions:
- make a progressive web app. No, it’s not a native experience. But if your priority is cross platform then this is cross platform. Service Workers etc make it a ton more paletable than it was back in the day.
- make native UI and code your business logic in some kind of shared layer (Rust, Go, Kotlin Multiplatform). Native UI has come a long way too, as someone who speaks webdev I find SwiftUI and Jetpack Compose to be very grokkable compared to their predecessors, a lot like React if you squint a little.