[frankus]

I think business-logic-in-JavaScript is something cross-platform folks shouldn't snooze on either, with the usual caveats of not doing anything performance-critical or where an asynchronous API would be awkward (to be clear, using JavaScriptCore or QuickJS or the like, not just running in a WebView)

But it'll run on iOS (v7.0+), Android (I think more recently) and of course web and server-side. And most importantly, it's hot-reloadable, as long as you don't run afoul of platform gatekeepers (i.e. use it for bug fixes and minor behavior changes, not like whole new features).

One of the frustrating things about mobile development is that once you ship a version, that version will almost certainly be running on at least someone's device indefinitely without being upgraded. My day job is even on step further back in that we have to get our customers to update the version of our SDK that they're integrating (which for many of them means contracting out because they don't have an in-house mobile dev team), before they ship an app update, which then needs to be installed by end-users, whose device might not even support the new deployment target…

(I've been trying to sell this to the bosses for the last 9 years or so, and never gotten the go-ahead, so there could be aspects I'm missing, but it always seemed like a huge missed opportunity).

[trevor-e]

OTA updates are definitely nice to have and I'm surprised there's not a way to do so with native iOS since RN and Flutter already support it. Technically it is possible with dynamic frameworks.

In practice though it's somewhat easy to workaround the lack of OTA with dynamic server configuration for clients.

[giancarlostoro]

It used to be allowed, then Apple banned it outright. You're technically not supposed to do it even with RN...

[bpavuk]

yes. there is an aspect you are missing.

no one in their right mind wants to bundle Chromium with every app install, and every Discord user hates mobile Discord app, which is, guess what? uses Chromium!

[iknowstuff]

Your profile is full of incorrect assertions about software. What do you do for a living

[wiseowise]

There’s no Chromium in RN, that’s the whole idea behind Native part. It ships optimized JS runtime called Hermes.

And Discord mobile app on iOS doesn’t even use RN, it’s a native application.

[NSUserDefaults]

For JS driving the business logic you do not need a browser to run it. On iOS there is JavaScriptCore and there are other Javascript runtimes out there that are quite small.

That said, it is true that Javascript may not be the right choice for every app and some developers may be used to better language features and performance than that.

[cyberax]

React.Native doesn't use Chromium.