Comment by azuanrb
16 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.
> "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
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.