what are the chances React Native or Kotlin Multip...

# ios

[Gaurav Prakash]

what are the chances React Native or Kotlin Multiplatform overshadowed Native development ?

[Pablichjenkov]

IMO really high and sooner than we might expect. Cross-platform in general. There are other players too, flutter, Avalonia ui, Maui, electron and so on.
I have seen billion revenue companies pushing to cut development costs and going react-native.
Anyone could say companies of such a size wouldn't care about these expenses but doesn't seem to be the case.

[kpgalligan]

It already has, depending on how you look at it. I put a few minutes into that in my KC talk:

https://youtu.be/-tJvCOfJesk?si=hExi49dkbZMdj4cy&t=777▾

. Native is huge in big public apps. In everything else, it's a different story, and certainly much different compare to a few years ago.

[Michael Langford]

RN is constantly picked by teams who think they can avoid the costs of native development. Some of them can. Often, they get into some horrid corner then cannot rescue and get really slow/weird. There is a lot of weird back and forth of skilling up and down in those orgs when they have a complex app.

KM is a far far more flexible tool than even things marginally similar to it (such as Xamarin was). As you don't have to abandon fully native UI with it, iOS and android app UIs can be fully written in their native languages or not as fits your needs, and when things go wrong, they go far far more understandably wrong than with the RN situation. If you have not been elbows deep in a RN project with serious intractable errors, you cannot understand how not the future it is. So many people hard no RN in every level of a company after seeing teams crater in those situations.

[Pablichjenkov]

I agree with you Michael 💯
However, RN has advantage in time to market over compose multiplatform.
Vendor companies and agencies are pushing it to the enterprise and they are buying into it like crazy. They buy into kid demos and things like that not considering scalability, maintainability and such. All, at the cost of giving us engineers more headaches.
But RN has positives too, not all is bad. At the end managers see the same screen in both Oses and they love it. Not considering performance or anything although RN is not what it used to be either.

[Pablichjenkov]

Now, the interesting part is that once RN gets in. Is hard to replace it because they happy with that

[Pablichjenkov]

I am basing my post on my experience. Enterprise companies that trust vendors more than their engineers. Different companies where engineers rule is a different story

[kpgalligan]

Different orgs pick different things for different reasons. It's a long debate, but I think the future will more be a choice between which option is better for them (obviously), and most orgs who aren't building public apps can often live without "native". As a native dev, I mostly dont see that world at all unless looking for it, but it's alot bigger than actual native dev (if you look at it from "number of screens/apps deployed" regardless of context or audience size).

s hard to replace it because they happy with that

Happy is a strong word. In places that have wed engineers that start using RN, happier, sometimes actually happy. A lot of it comes down to expertise as well.
Agree on the idea that engineering "culture", and political strength in the org, plays a big role. I'd also say, the next 5-10 years will be interesting. There are a lot of people who started their careers in the age of native mobile, and rather than "love" the web, they would prefer something "native", or closer, but don't perceive the cost as worth it. Sharing all non-UI code, and maybe most of the screens that you don't use a lot, but (on iOS) building the main screens native, could be compelling. To a large degree, it's a "see how it goes" situation.

[Michael Langford]

At the end managers see the same screen in both Oses and they love it. Not considering performance or anything although RN is not what it used to be either.

Pablichenko ^ this is 100% the real issue 😄

[kpgalligan]

There's also a possible different direction, which is, if WASM and web compose on canvas is reasonably good, there are also a whole bunch of situations where web is no longer the "anchor". That's far more speculative, but we'll see.

[Michael Langford]

OMG I as the manager have to learn to use our app 2x times, which essentially none of our customers need to do is such the core concern driving much of RN adoption

[Pablichjenkov]

Couldn't agree more Kevin

[Pablichjenkov]

I laugh sometimes because one of the vendors selling points is Javascript. They say they won't have problem at all replacing resources since anyone can write JS, college students, bootcamps graduates, kids and whatever else
They don't know what they talking, I just laughed when heard that one.

[Pablichjenkov]

Like if replacing a core engineer was a matter of knowing the language

[Michael Langford]

I think wasm is a wonderful output if it ever happens. Kotlin web being so far along is admirable IMO. Yes, and vendors will promise a loooooot of things.

[Pablichjenkov]

All the time 😀