This is why the JavaScript people said screw the whole thing and worked on porting web-esque development to mobile rather than trying to learn how to develop native apps. The difference in developer velocity is obscene. The only close native competitor I can think of is Flutter, which ironically is severely hampered by having to interoperate with Xcode (the thing that takes the most time out of any other task is compiling a production build). Flutter uses Dart which almost reads like vanilla JavaScript, and instead of dealing with the native UIs they just used Skia[1] to draw pixel-perfect equivalents for each platform (as opposed to React Native, which attempts to use the actual UI components and make them available in JS).
Ironically for hobby projects I've been using react-native as well, because it really makes developing a app faster, even though it will be bloated as hell. It's funny how even flutter decided to go with "new language" route. I guess NIH is strong in Android and iOS ecosystems.. I miss maemo/meego ...
Maemo is still around in the form of Maemo Leste. There are also various other open source mobile projects, notably postmarketOS. In terms of hardware, the PinePhone and Purism Librem 5 are projects aimed at non-Android open source operating systems like Linux/BSD.
Can you elaborate on the bloated part? I created a simple HN clone in React Native (without expo) and after publishing to Play Store, the app size was under 10MB.
Simple color picker app I made is 25MB. Even 10MB sounds pretty large for a simple app. But what I'm trying to say is more that I don't feel very hygienic considering using all these abstractions to develop a simple app, if I could just use the same C codebase to deploy for both platforms. Latter is technically possible, but nobody has created a framework around it similar to flutter or react-native. Flutter seems like the better option for the hygiene now though.
Funny enough there has been a long standing issue (as in years) with metal shaders that make the first minute or so of animations in flutter stuttery as the shaders compile.
Kind of? But there seems to be a bunch of barriers in making it happen:
SkSL warm-up doesn’t help newer iPhones using Metal.
Flutter recently migrated from OpenGL to Metal for all newer iOS devices. (Please reference Metal on iOS FAQ on which iOS devices are considered new enough to use Metal.) However, Skia currently only implemented the SkSL warm-up for OpenGL. So the SkSL warm-up would only speed up older iOS devices by default. If you find shader compilation jank to be an issue for your app on newer iPhones, please let us know by filing a GitHub issue. In the longer term, we have a plan to use test-based shader warm-up to mitigate this. If there’s an urgent need for fixing shader compilation jank on newer iPhones, please leave feedback on Issue 61045, and we can help you turn on OpenGL for your app.
[1] https://skia.org/docs/dev/flutter/