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.
They famously DID NOT have any android app for a while. Contrary to what the Emacs HN keyboard warriors might think, the world actually used predominantly iPhone as the smartphone especially among the kids in the US. Their android experience didnt really matter.
So once again... why focus so much on cross platform? You're glazing Snap a whole lot but not answering my question. I don't deny that they have some incredible engineering, but that's not a reason to invest a lot into a cross platform UI framework rather than just using something off the shelf like React Native or building the app natively to begin with.
And then you call it simple?