Hi - Thanks I don't consider myself responsible for the overall success of the app, it's a big company.
I know really well about how 'tech moves' as my first developer career was based on advanced and deeply immersive ActionScript3 Flash apps - and the speed that died was a genuine warning to never be complacent that I'm still fully aware of even now.
But I'm not convinced that 'web-apps' are the universal panacea you seem to think they are.
To begin with, the apparent simplicity of your app (forgive me if I'm underestimating the complexity of any features you don't mention in the article) suggests to me something that could be built using SwiftUI in a couple of days.
For side projects or simple UI applications, SwiftUI is so fast to put together that it really outstrips the setup speed of any of the web frameworks I've used in the past. Simply learning a bit of Kotlin and/or teaming-up with one other Android developer (which in itself would be a great learning opportunity) means that you could develop native apps pretty much as quickly and easily as learning and implementing an Ionic app.
You also (both here and in the article) focus on "user's desire for more elaborate UIs" - but the emphasis in most apps is not an "elaborate UI" but speed, reliability, predictability and accessibility.
In my experience, native frameworks provide a better user-experience in all these areas.
Even if you learn SwiftUI, and get a Kotlin developer for Android, you'll still need a web developer for those who just want a web app. Notion, Spotify, Hulu, etc, all have web apps. Even Gmail still has a web app, albeit an extremely poor one, which goes to show how much work multi-platform support is. The benefit of frameworks like Ionic is to support multiple platforms without having to maintain multiple codebases. So as the gap shrinks between native and web, it starts making more sense to just write a single web app
Gmail's web app is "extremely poor"? I almost never experience any issues with it, and it's quite streamlined in my experience. It's not worse than the Android app (it's actually nicer, IMO, but that's probably in large part because it's on a big screen). It could be more responsive, but that's about it.
Hi - Thanks I don't consider myself responsible for the overall success of the app, it's a big company.
I know really well about how 'tech moves' as my first developer career was based on advanced and deeply immersive ActionScript3 Flash apps - and the speed that died was a genuine warning to never be complacent that I'm still fully aware of even now.
But I'm not convinced that 'web-apps' are the universal panacea you seem to think they are.
To begin with, the apparent simplicity of your app (forgive me if I'm underestimating the complexity of any features you don't mention in the article) suggests to me something that could be built using SwiftUI in a couple of days.
For side projects or simple UI applications, SwiftUI is so fast to put together that it really outstrips the setup speed of any of the web frameworks I've used in the past. Simply learning a bit of Kotlin and/or teaming-up with one other Android developer (which in itself would be a great learning opportunity) means that you could develop native apps pretty much as quickly and easily as learning and implementing an Ionic app.
You also (both here and in the article) focus on "user's desire for more elaborate UIs" - but the emphasis in most apps is not an "elaborate UI" but speed, reliability, predictability and accessibility.
In my experience, native frameworks provide a better user-experience in all these areas.