A place for developers to talk about building on Farcaster.

/dev

If you were to build a mobile app today, would you build it in Swift or React Native (or other)?

What are the current trade-offs?

Head of Engineering @ Bitwise | Arsenal fan, cyclist, poker enthusiast | @purple #143 🟪 

If cross-platform is no issue, I’d build it in Swift. I prefer it over React Native plus there’s less build and distribution headaches. Tradeoff is obviously that it’s iOS only. 

Writer. Building @pinatacloud. Working on simple static site hosting https://orbiter.host \ https://polluterofminds.com

Why do you prefer Swift to React Native? And what are the build and distribution headaches?

(I'm a total noob on mobile - I have done mostly backend a bit of frontend React dev)

Woah, I didn't know about SwiftUI. Looks cool. Thank you!

If you would have asked me 2-3 years ago, I would have said RN hands down. But SwiftUI was the gamechanger for me. It’s really nice to use, easy to learn, and makes it so you don’t have to reach for some of the more complex Swift tools nearly as often.

As for build headaches, just like with Electron, you’re relying on a third party to properly orchestrate a build and distribution process when you use RN. It works, obviously. But it’s not as seamless as a distribution directly from your Xcode project in Swift.