Working at a company that uses react-native I wish nothing more than for the end of app stores and differing platform languages.
We're heavily considering just having a website next year with a mobile app using webview, and then native code for the native notifications, GPS and healthkit / health connect.
I feel like AI is changing the equation, its nearly better to write your business UI 3 times one for each platform.
It’s called a “WebView app” and you can get a really good experience on all platforms using them. Just:
- don’t make any crazy decisions on your fundamental UI components, like breadcrumbs, select dropdowns, etc
- add a few platform-specific specialisations to those same components, to make them feel a bit more familiar, such as button styling, or using a self-simplifying back-stack on Android
- test to make sure your webview matches the native browser’s behaviour where it matters. For example, sliding up the view when the keyboard is opened on mobile, navigating back & forth with edge-swipes on iOS, etc
I also went the extra step and got service workers working, for a basic offline experience, and added a native auto network diagnostic tool that runs on app startup and checks “Can reach local network” “Can reach internet (1.1.1.1)” “Can resolve our app’s domain” etc etc, so users can share where it failed to get quicker support. But this is an app for small-to-medium businesses, not consumer-facing, and the HTML5 part is served from the server and cached. I haven’t thought much about what you might need to do additionally for a consumer app, or a local-first app.
It’s because if a webview app experience is good, you don’t notice it, you only notice if it’s bad.
A while ago saw a blog link on HN that explained how Apple uses it everywhere and we never notice it because they are done well. Of course I can’t find that link now, I summon the HN gods…
On mobile the webview app experience is crap and it's immediately obvious that an app is not native. Simply nobody asks customers how they like it. The management assumes that as long as nobody complains and the users don't leave in droves, the experience must be impeccable.
> It’s because if a webview app experience is good, you don’t notice it, you only notice if it’s bad.
Aside from Apple’s apps (which imo are noticeably worse than the old ones, but that’s beside the point), what are some good WebView apps on iOS right now?
Yes, Apple's apps are really really bad - including the app store. I am not even sure whether that app store can be considered a stand alone app or we should call it part of the OS.
A webview app is by design bad. Webviews were made for one thing - web views.
Somebody scraped the play store and checked the framework, so a list for Android WebView apps, built with capacitor, is here: https://capgo.app/top_capacitor_app/ Maybe an equivalent is there on iOS for the same app...
Sadly i couldn’t find a reliable way to do it on Apple Store, it’s pretty hard to download from the store outside of apple device. If anyone know how i can do it too
> It stands to reason that Apple wouldn't have developed this feature [liquid glass css property] if they weren't using it. Where? We have no idea. But they must be using it somewhere. The fact that none of us have noticed exactly where suggests that we're interacting with webviews in our daily use of iOS without ever even realising it.
There's some jump from _a property exists_ to _it must be used_, but a massive one from _a property exists_ to _Apple uses it everywhere and we never notice it because they are done well_.
If Apple are using it for the AppStore - then I defo Italy do notice it. The AppStore runs so badly.
I would be interested in any links to Webview apps that run really well, I’ve never seen one that I’m aware of but so many that I am aware of and are bad!
I have experienced the opposite with Zed, which has its own bespoke UI framework - it behaved somewhat unexpectedly and didn't work exactly how I'm used to an UI to behave giving me this uncanny feeling.
This kinda shows you how much effort and experience goes into getting an UI framework right, and the long tail quirks (of which there are a zillion) matter for UX, and while I appreciate they took on the task of breaking away from the browser, it's understandable why someone wants to ship an app on time and budget goes with a web based solution.
I use Voyager, a client for Lemmy, on a daily basis and it’s my favorite mobile (iPad) app. Voyager is the spiritual successor to the Apollo client for Reddit.
The app uses Ionic’s Capacitor, which to my rudimentary understanding is the webview-based upgrade of Cordova. I’ve had far fewer issues with this app than the likes of Bluesky (react native) and Discord (I think also react native but not sure).
The webview approach seems to be the only way for a one-person team to feasible provide a cross-platform app with an app-store presence. Another promising alternative to Capacitor is Tauri Mobile which does essentially the same thing, but mobile doesn’t seem to be a high priority for them.
I installed this on Android, and unless iOS experience is massively different, this is not a good example:
- there's no touch feedback (ripple) on many of clickable components. Some that do have it look non-native, inconsistent and sometimes gets stuck
- the search bar on top app bar in `search` tab looks very non-native and non-standard (it's elevated on top of elevated app bar already)
- the lists look iOS-y, especially settings
- the settings list item has weird glitch where it loses background after touching (but not clicking)
- collapsing comments is pretty choppy (on a Samsung S25 so a pretty powerful phone)
- can't swipe down a bottom sheet (with post options/actions)
- it's just not android-y — the navigation is weird, the design is all over the place,
It's not unusable and it's a good tradeoff for a small team I guess. But this is nowhere near the experience a native app can provide, and has lots of small papercuts that would make for at least a slightly frustrating experience. It is a decent app don't get me wrong, but it's clearly not native
Like GP I haven't experienced many WebView based apps that are great so I had to give this a spin and I have to say it's actually pretty good! I would not have identified this as a WebView app if I didn't already know about it from this comment.
I've done it before on a personal project and I was pretty obsessed with user experience. For example, I changed the way buttons work (because they were natively links with Cordova, which trigger upon tap, not "finger lift", like native buttons). Also, implemented some gestures to e.g. switch between pages (tab-style navigation). While not really in line with system UI (wasn't my goal), I think usability is quite decent.
Do you use iOS by any chance? On android I've very noticed performance problems. Even in apps like Discord and Instagram. But Google maps and Duolingo are pretty bad at times for example. So it's not webviews that are the common denominator here
Gathering all the metaphors (I know) here for reference:
- "All toupées look fake. I've never seen one that I couldn't tell was fake." [1]
- All CGI in movies looks fake. It jumps out at me every time I see it."
- All WebView apps suck. Every one I've seen has a bad obviously-web-derived UI.
re: that last one though -- I'd at least acknowledge that WebView apps are roughly at the end of the early-2000's era of CGI: not exactly "The Rock in The Scorpion King" bad, but generally not at the level of Avatar or Les Misérables.
Using webviews on native platforms can look very appealing from a management perspective: a single codebase, simpler coordination, reduced UX overhead, and faster iteration cycles.
However, from the user's side, this approach often results in a buggy, inconsistent experience that lacks the responsiveness and smoothness of a true native app that elusive "snappy" feeling (i know, I hate that word too)
Companies usually choose this route because it's cheaper, but that same "cheap mentality" often seeps into the overall product quality. Corners get cut, bugs get ignored, and long-term maintenance becomes a mess.
From a developer's perspective, it's a nightmare
You're essentially expected to deliver on three platforms doing the work of three people for the same $
In theory, any web developer could handle it. In practice, you need to understand all the native platforms just to maintain some basic, stable integrations even with frameworks like React Native.
The result?
Maybe 20% of your time goes into actual feature development, 30% into testing, and the remaining 70% into fixing obscure, platform-specific bugs while working overtime under pressure from cost-driven management.
In my experience, developers will do almost anything to avoid dealing with the native parts of this kind of setup those tasks usually get dumped on whoever is most "familiar" with native, because it's such a pain to handle.
And let's not forget QA testing across these hybrid layers is an absolute nightmare as well.
In the end, my view is simple:
If a company can't afford dedicated native teams, they probably shouldn't build a native app.
(Of course, smaller apps with limited complexity should be fine)
Isn't there a high chance your app is going to be rejected from app stores because you use a web view? You can change your whole app completely upon approval.
Or you ship your HTML/JS and not just embed a URL?
I try this every decade. Love the first few months for speed. Then I end up paying the price later when I want to integrate "new OS feature X" or make a system gesture/style/animation feel native.
Lack of swipe for back on iOS is usually the easiest way to tell I'm looking at a web view.
I recently downloaded the Moodle app and was surprised to find it's powered by Ionic and a webview, which I only realized due to CSS misconfigurations that caused the app to fall back to Serif font for CJK glyphs.
Recent mid-tier phones are powerful enough that webview has a negligible impact on performance.
CapacitorJS makes for a REALLY awesome app dev experience compared with React Native. It's basically just a really well integrated system for building exactly what you describe. The company I work at made the switch from an RN app to a CJS one and it was might and day in so many ways, performance included!
I personally have a preference for Apple's native frameworks. From a purely engineering standpoint, they're very well thought out and have very clear separations of concerns. Spending my time with their libraries helped me write good, scalable code for platforms beyond their own.
That said, platform lock-in is bad for business because it makes operations dependent on a single provider, but I have no delusions that a web front-end is better.
From an engineering standpoint, front-end web frameworks are less complete and require too many third-party libraries and tooling to assemble. From a UX standpoint, it's actually worse--almost every website you visit today spams you upfront with Google sign-in and invasive cookie permission requests that you can't refuse. But never mind that--from a purely business standpoint, a single platform accessible anywhere saves costs. Most importantly, however, the web is a "safe space" for deploying software anti-patterns without an intermediary entity (i.e an app store) to police your code, so you can do whatever the heck you want.
I'd wish for nothing more than the end of web and app front-ends in favor of purely structured data derived from natural language prompts by users. However, the more realistic mindset seems to be that: the front-end layer is such a high level of abstraction with a very low barrier to entry, so that its tech stack will be in constant flux, in favor of whoever's currently the best-financed entity seeking the most market share, the most developer mind-share, and the most behavioral control among its users.
That. And specifically, fuck Apple and their prohibition on JITs.
We have a React Native app that shares some code with a webapp, and that needs to do some geometry processing. So we're constantly playing the game of "will it interpret quick enough". Everything works fine in browsers, but in a RN app it often slows down to unusable speeds.
Could your processing work in a webview? i.e. webgl or webasm or similar and you communicate with it via postMessage. Something like Polygen might help with the scaffolding, but I have not tried it personally
The <canvas> tag using webgl offers a lot lower access to buffers than you might imagine and is very accessible using JS/DOM. I've gotten surgical AR devices approved from FDA - if it works good enough for life or death situations - it can certainly work for a toy app.
So you can get native behaviors when it’s critical. Like share sheets, push and many other critical features that only apps get even if the bulk of the experience can be done in a webview. This is because mobile OS platforms choose not to make these available to web apps, because app store profits are better for them than an open ecosystem where sites can do the same things as apps.
Using apps made with Electron or those so-called "universal" UI frameworks I wish nothing more than for everything to be native.
They always have to give up some basic or hidden conveniences that native controls get for free, so they always feel slightly different and "off" in a weird way which induces a constant vague annoyance while using them, like walking with a little pebble in your shoe, or a sitting in an chair that isn't balanced right.
It's funny how even after 50 years UI still isn't "solved" ..before writing a universal API, we don't even have universal consensus, or at least some kind of standards authority, on how controls should behave.
Hell not even users can’t agree, as would be seen on any comments about this topic, on stuff like whether lists should scroll up when swiping down, or scroll down when swiping up :')
Unfortunately, all too often not enough. But then again often one has UX designers for that, but they are all too often off to build flying castles in Figma.
Looks in concept very similar to React Native. So now we have React Native, Lynx.js (ByteDance/Tiktok) and Valdi all based on React. I think competition is good for devs. But not sure if any of those will create ecosystem and community big enough and fast enough to React Native.
React Native grew a lot this year and a lot of things got or will be improved and copied from Lynx or Valid:
- 3 modes of compilation (AOT, JIT) from Valdi will be in static hermes (RN) in coming months.
- native binding generation -> RN already have such official generator and also nitro/nitrogen, they also working on Node-API
- executing animation and JS code in different thread (Lynx.js) -> worklet library in RN from swmansion
- tailwindcss support (Lynx) -> uniwind in RN land.
I think Lynx.js maybe have better shot at React Native since they want to support other frameworks instead of only React.
I was at Snap during this project’s early days (Screenshop!) and spent a bit of time debugging some stuff directly with Simon. He’s a wonderful engineer and I’m thrilled to see this project out in the open.
Congratulations Snap team! Well deserved.
I'm surprised Snap of all companies invested in a cross-platform UI framework given how simple their app seems in comparison to more complex ones out there.
And more importantly, Snapchat seems like an app which could highly benefit from tight integration with native features (eg. camera, AR features, notifications, screenshot detection, etc.)
These companies have super talented engineers and can afford to invest in skunkworks projects like these when they can’t find any suitable options in the market.
More like "super talented engineers" will keep increasing cost of such projects until they get told this stuff doesn't generate revenue/cost cutting is happening, so work more on ad tech, leave or find external free labor("community") to maintain it.
As far as Im concerned, Snapchat is onw of the most complicated apps thats routinely used by hundreds of millions of people. You yourself listed all the features they have. And every one of them is pixel perfect, with insane amounts of time spent perfecting the user experience of every single ome of those features. In fact, the success of Snap could be attributed to how pixel perfect the app is.
I share your opinion, but I think of the comment above like this. If something thinks your ui "just makes sense" and is dead simple to use, then you know you've perfected it. That is the best compliment you can get.
You kind of just proved my point. If they want attention to detail and good performance then writing native is probably better. The simplicity that I was referring to was the number of views that need to be implemented. A cross platform UI framework would help if there were hundreds of views that needed to be built consistently but for the number of views in Snapchat, I think native implementations would probably be faster and cheaper.
As for the "success of Snap could be attributed to how pixel perfect the app is". I think the success of Snap can be attributed to a lot of things. But if you took a look at how unoptimized the Android experience was in 2017 when it was taking off I don't know how you could call it pixel perfect.
Snapchat, an app which half-assed picture taking so hard that it did so by simply snapshotting the camera preview, rather than bothering to take an actual photo.
Definitely one of the cooler projects to watch while I was there. I recall the goal was to open-source it from early on, so I'm glad to see it come to fruition!
I cannot possibly think of something I would want to use less. A Snapchat-developed UI framework where communication is done via Discord sounds like something carefully designed to repulse me.
I think it’s been changed since, but wow was it weird finding out that instead of taking photos, the Android app used to essentially take a screenshot of the camera view.
I worked on the camera in Instagram iOS for a while. There at least, there could be a 5,000ms latency delta between the “screen preview” and the actual full quality image asset from the camera DSP in the SOC.
I don’t know a thing about Android camera SDK but I can easily see how this choice was the right balance for performance and quality at the time on old hardware (I’m thinking 2013 or so).
Users didn’t want the full quality at all, they’d never zoom. Zero latency would be far more important for fueling the viral flywheel.
I worked on the Snapchat Android back in 2017. It's only weird for people who have never had to work with cameras on Android :) Google's done their best to wrangle things with CameraX, but there's basically a bajillion phones out there with different performance and quality characteristics. And Snap is (rightfully) hyper-fixated on the ability to open the app and take a picture as quickly as possible. The trade off they made was a reasonable one at the time.
Things have improved since then, but as I understand it, the technical reason behind that is that it used to be that only the camera viewfinder API was universal between devices. Every manufacturer implemented their cameras differently, and so developers had to write per-model camera handling to take high quality photos and video.
:) this is exactly how we used to do it even on iOS, back in the days before camera APIs were not made public, but Steve Jobs personally allowed such apps to be published in the iOS App Store (end of 2009) ...
> Valdi is a cross-platform UI framework that delivers native performance without sacrificing developer velocity. Write your UI once in declarative TypeScript, and it compiles directly to native views on iOS, Android, and macOS—no web views, no JavaScript bridges.
If you are curious how components' state is handled, they employed the React class components method:
// Import the StatefulComponent
import { StatefulComponent } from 'valdi_core/src/Component';
// ViewModel + State interfaces for component
export interface TimerViewModel { loop: number }
interface TimerState { elapsed: number }
// Component class
export class Timer extends StatefulComponent<TimerViewModel, TimerState> {
// Initialize the state
state = { elapsed: 0 };
// When creating the component, start a periodic logic
private interval?: number;
// Initialize the setInterval that will update state once a second incrementing
// the `elapsed` state value.
onCreate() {
this.interval = setInterval(() => {
// Increment the state to trigger a re-render periodically
const elapsed = this.state.elapsed;
const loop = this.viewModel.loop;
this.setState({ elapsed: (elapsed + 1) % loop });
}, 1000);
}
// When component is removed, make sure to cleanup interval logic
onDestroy() {
if (this.interval) clearInterval(this.interval);
}
// Render visuals will depend both on the state and the view model
onRender() {
<view padding={30} backgroundColor='lightblue'>
<label value={`Time Elapsed: ${this.state.elapsed} seconds`} />;
<label value={`Time Looping every: ${this.viewModel.loop} seconds`} />;
</view>;
}
}
I often wonder how the economics are justified in making in house frameworks. What is it about Snapchat that requires a new framework but not other apps?
As opposed to what? As opposed to not using a framework or using some other framework?
Using frameworks is expensive by orders of magnitude. It’s additional code which greatly increases tech debt and slows the execution time of the given product pretty significantly. Think about it like this: a business with high confidence developers can ship a new SPA in a tenth of the time just using vanilla JavaScript that fully renders to screen with complete state restoration across the internet in less than a quarter second. That also means the business saves boat loads of cash by shipping faster, experimenting against its user’s behavior, and needing only a quarter of the headcount. So, where do you find these people and how do you retain them?
The economics are pretty simple and completely offensive/hostile to the developers. It’s ultimately about hiring and firing. Developers are a cost center to the business so the goal is to always eliminate training and turn them into a replaceable commodity. That’s it. That developers believe this is somehow a great empowerment is a double win for the employer.
The reason a company might introduce a new framework is because they encounter a problem not immediately solved by existing frameworks. The more frequently that same problem occurs the more a new framework pays for itself.
Valdi seems very similar in concept to React Native but Meta being the biggest competition to them you unlikely gonna depend on that even if better. Same reason ByteDance (Tiktok) doing Lynx.js (also similar to Valdi and React Native and also based on React).
The only FAANG scale companies that adopted React Native are Microsoft and Amazon because they aren't directly competing with Meta.
Given the user hostility of Google
and Apple (and the rest) and the rate at which they emulate competitors and try to crush them, I’d start at a small library or framework and not stop until I had a whole OS.
I agree, this is the way. To be clear: I'm not a mobile developer, and have only dabbled with it over the years, but I'm generally familiar with the stacks.
If you want to simplify development of a cross-platform app, your work should start by architecting the software in a way that the core business logic is agnostic to the user interfaces. Then your web, mobile, and desktop GUIs, CLI, TUI, API, and any other way a user interacts with your program are simply thin abstractions that call your core components.
The complexity of each UI will inevitably vary, and it might not be possible to offer a consistent experience across platforms or to leverage unique features of each platform without making your core a tangled mess, so this is certainly not "easy" to do in practice, but this approach should avoid the bulk of the work of targetting individual platforms than if you had done it any other way. It should also avoid depending on a 3rd-party framework that may or may not exist a few years down the line.
One extra clarification: If the quality of your app is business critical you should really use the native UI toolkit to offer the best platform integration and user experience.
If your app is not business critical (you just have to offer it - example: dishwasher app, ..) you might get away with using a cross platform toolkit like flutter or react native. But even then this adds a 3rd party dependency as you mentioned which adds risk.
Writing an App in Swift on iOS is boring. The same thing is true for writing an Android app using Kotlin/Java. This is a good thing. Now your developers can concentrate on shipping great features.
This looks promising. I would love to see more examples of what this can do along with screenshots. As is, there is a single Hello World and the components library is “coming soon”. But if it can deliver what it promises that would be pretty cool. React Native is I think the main popular framework in this space.
One of the Valdi's authors here.
It's using native views under the hood, like React Native, and there are 3 modes of compilation/execution for the TS source. It can be interpreted from JS (TS compiled to minified JS source), interpreted from JS bytecode (TS compiled to JS source, minified, then compiled to JS bytecode ahead of time), or compiled to native code directly (TS compiled to C ahead of time).
An AOT TS -> C compiler is fantastic - how much of the language is supported, what are the limitations on TS support? I assume highly dynamic stuff and eval is out-of-scope?
Most of the TS language is supported, things that are not can be considered bugs that we need to fix. Eval is supported but it won't be able to capture variables outside of the eval string itself. We took a reverse approach than most other TS to native compiler projects: we wanted the compiler to be as compatible with JS as possible, at the expense of reducing performance initially, to make it possible to adopt the native compiler incrementally at scale.
There are significant trade-offs with this compiler at the moment: it uses much more binary size than minified JS or JS bytecode, and performance improvements goes from 2x to sometimes zero. It's a work-in-progress, it's pretty far along in what it supports, but its value-proposition is not yet where it needs to be.
If the framework is used, eventually there will be 3rd party lib adding new features (from the top of my mind, maps), and someone will need to write the bridging with the native SDK. It means the bridge will most likely need to be written in objective-C instead of Swift
So now I can finally implement the most god-awful, ugly, cumbersome and unintuitive GUI methodology ever to face a large population of users into my own apps? This abomination that started the whole user-experience decline by making this kind of yuck the gold standard for apps today is finally open source?
I hope it has "load spam ads directly into the list the user was about to touch somehow the millisecond before they touch it using magical force field technology so they click the wrong thing every time" functionality. I've been missing that in my apps
It's a really wonky app. The main feature works fine, no issue. Their "Stories" section, I can't can navigate that at all, there a no hint to how it works, so I don't use it. Seems a little weird, given that this is where the ads are, why wouldn't Snapchat make that easier to use?
There's also views I can get into which I can't figure out how to leave, so I force close the app to get back.
I don't necessarily think that's a flaw of the framework, just how Snapchat designs their app.
Snap is the greatest innovator of user experiences in this generation. This is evidenced by the fact that literally every other social media app is just a hodgepodge copycat of sorts of what snap invented. For people who introduced themselves to tech with snap as one of their first apps, its the most intuitive thing ever.
When they first introduced video calls, schools had to close for a day.
Imagine then you come here and see someone calls it awful. Can't help but think its just an instance of "old man yelling at clouds".
Don't take me argument as one against the point that it was massively popular and influential, en contraire, that's often the common factor in things I tend to dislike: the norm/ the mainstream.
It's mostly subjective when talking UI, and a lot plays in too regarding the lack of competive platforms with different UI's.
All valid points. Made me actually think about the likely first actions an alien or newborn would take with a 2025 touch screen device. Chomp. Chew. Swipe.
If your entire company is all about making a single good app, I doubt having AI changes the architecture much. Its still an architectural decision of whether you're going to have a single codebase for your app and focus on a framework to transpile it. Either way you need actual teams of experts on iOS android etc, no single person is going to master all of them.
We're heavily considering just having a website next year with a mobile app using webview, and then native code for the native notifications, GPS and healthkit / health connect.
I feel like AI is changing the equation, its nearly better to write your business UI 3 times one for each platform.
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