Show HN: Rumblelist, a React-based task app. Trying to build mobile version

https://www.rumblelist.com/why-another-task-manager/

by feech • 10 years ago

22 19 10 years ago

feech8• 10 years ago

This is a new app I am trying to launch. We had a ton of success with React as the web app, but building the mobile stuff has really slowed us down.

mwcampbell2• 10 years ago

Can you say more about the obstacles you've encountered building the mobile app? Just curious.

feech8• 10 years ago

So, first off, I've never done mobile, but I've been writing software for 30 years. The biggest issues are probably obvious and are heard all over the place:

1) cross platform mobile-app development is a nightmare. I tried Xamarin and gave up because I felt like I would have to learn an whole new layer of syntax to do any UX work. Also the build times, the heavy lifting that was going to be required to setup the simulation environments, etc. just didn't make sense.

2) Setting up your development environment is just a complete nightmare. After a week or two of messing around, I finally got the Android emulators working at reasonable performance on my Windows machine. Still haven't even attempted to hook up a mac.

3) The amount of third party code, npm modules, and pre-processing required to build the simplest shell application is astounding. My current "shell" app, after first build, is 32k files and almost 300MB. Its absurd. and the app doesn't even do ANYTHING yet. The problem with all this code is that no one can possibly understand ALL this plumbing, and the instant something goes wrong, you're immediately sucked into non-productive rabbit holes.

All that being said, this is an awesome learning experience. I've been avoiding mobile development for years hoping it would mature, and I guess it has somewhat, but at this point, feeling like I won the lottery when I finally was able to set a breakpoint in my VS Code editor, run a react-native application through the emulator and hit the breakpoint. Ha!

cscharenberg• 10 years ago

Nativescript has been a godsend to me of turning working web apps into mobile apps.

feech8• 10 years ago

I've been trying to stay away from Angular development. I've heard that ecosystem is just in a tizzy right now.

nicoburns• 10 years ago

You might want to consider using Cordova. The performance is pretty good these days, and you could probably reuse most of your existing codebase.

acjohnson55• 10 years ago

Maybe consider a progressive web application (PWA). A couple interesting articles I've read recently:

https://medium.com/javascript-scene/native-apps-are-doomed-a...

https://medium.com/javascript-scene/why-native-apps-really-a...

feech8• 10 years ago

Started reading those articles and immediately loved it. I did a bit of research a few weeks back because I had already been considering this approach. The consensus seemed to be that the app would suffer from performance issues primarily.

feech8• 10 years ago

Ok, so I read through those articles and my curiosity is peaked. If you had to guess, what would be your ETA on support for PWA's on IOS.. I think thats the elephant in the room.

tyingq• 10 years ago

I'm somewhat curious if native mobile apps might start falling out of favor...at least for apps that mostly pull outside data.

I see the advantage for things that run fully (or mostly) locally, like games.

I don't really understand the advantage for other types of applications. Airline apps are a good example. Everything that's interesting about them requires live data that isn't stale. Yet these types of apps are very popular. I assume browsers will start closing on whatever functional gaps make it this way. The wasted time/effort to create 4 distinct experiences (desktop, mobile web, IOS, Android) irks me.

feech8• 10 years ago

To me, personally, its the trade off. A well built responsive HTML based UX is the easiest development approach. The thing that concerns me is that I don't know how much "easier" mobile dev can get, and I don't think it can come anywhere close to raw web based dev. So I concur :-)

axemclion2• 10 years ago

If you guys are trying react native, you could try mobile.azure.com for the devops pipeline.

bhtp• 10 years ago

The scroll to top button appears to cover the live chat button on mobile.

Show HN: Rumblelist, a React-based task app. Trying to build mobile version

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