← Back to context

Comment by spiderice

1 day ago

Nobody is talking about the real advantage of RN: Being able to release to the App Store without having to go through a review. That's so massive. Getting a bug fix out to users instantly, sneaking in optimizations, etc..

Sure, you need a review to release native code changes, and you should probably get a review if you have big feature changes just for the sake of Apple not banning you. But in practice, it removes one of the biggest annoyances of developing for the App Store.

20 comments

spiderice

Reply
tcoff91  1 day ago

Over the air updates is SO valuable with react-native. Being able to ship hotfixes instantly to our users has saved our asses multiple times.

azuanrb  21 hours ago

I’ve worked with both native and cross-platform. I think the mentality of being able to make changes quickly without much review often comes from cross-platform, especially when the developers come from a web background.

Changes are cheap and fast, so teams often feel less pressure to test everything thoroughly before a release. Which is a fair tradeoff. That’s part of the reason we can have dozens of releases a day on the web. Not just because we can, but because sometimes we have to.

With native, you know each release is harder to roll back, so you tend to build more tooling around releases, think through changes more carefully, and test more thoroughly before they’re ready to ship. You opt for one bigger, more stable release every few weeks instead.

At the end of the day, both approaches work.

Heh, now that I think about it, maybe web and cross-platform devs were the original vibe coders? Changes are cheap and fast. Just move fast and break stuff.

Native devs are the old-school ones. Shipping is expensive, so you better get it as right as possible.

  • MrDresden  9 hours ago

    > "Native devs are the old-school ones. Shipping is expensive, so you better get it as right as possible."

    Exactly this. After close to two decades building for the platform, the mindset is really to be cautious and make sure everything is rock solid before shipping.

    This has more to do with building up a quality tool chain and testing process than being slow.

    But sometimes there is a need to ship over the air updates, and for that (on Kotlin) there is Zipline [0] from Cashapp. I haven't used it in anger yet, but I know some people who do and trust it.

    [0]: https://github.com/cashapp/zipline

  • sebmellen  14 hours ago

    Totally depends on your business model too. We have clients that often require quick changes for compliance reasons, and they need to ensure all users of our apps are congruently updated. That’s not easy without OTA.

sebmellen  1 day ago

This is so true, and I'm surprised that Shopify didn't mention it or that they don't use OTA updates.

mohamedkoubaa  16 hours ago

Are you saying a native app can't make an http request and update the code they JIT?

  • whstl  16 hours ago

    It can download Javascript (or other interpreted language, or config data), but you generally can't download and execute new compiled native code on iOS, due to iOS code-signing/executable-memory restrictions.

    Also keep in mind Apple might penalize you for dodging the review process and shipping new features, etc.

    (btw, one exception to the JIT rule is custom browsers for the EU)

  • jshmrsn  16 hours ago

    Precisely. That has always been prohibited both by technical measures and by the App Store review guidelines. Especially on Apple, but also on Google Play / Android as well.

  • kccqzy  14 hours ago

    Doing so would require the app to have the business logic written in JavaScript. Apple only allows JIT’ing JavaScript using JSC.