I'm planing to create a KMM Library to deal with Google analytics. So we create a single source of truth to add the tags we want to track in either IOS and Android mobile apps.
When a KMM is crated for dealing with libraries like Google Analytics, do we need to add in the library both versions IOS and Android Google Analytics ?
if so, I'd appreciate an example about how to deal with two libraries one in IOS and other in Android to execute it.
just need to confirm this,
thanks.
I gave a talk about doing this, and specifically talk about analytics in it.
https://www.droidcon.com/2022/06/28/sdk-design-and-publishing-for-kotlin-multiplatform-mobile/
The website has the wrong title, BTW.
Analytics generally is just a key and a map of values. The simple way to do this is to create an analytics interface in common code, and pass in an implementation on app start from Swift (and also on Android). That way, you don't need to figure out cinterop or anything complex with dependencies and versions.
With the release of tfjs-react-native and the ample support for the platform, is React Native stable and reliable enough for a startup to go all-in on to build cross-platform Machine Learning apps?
Note: We are building a Health-Tech app that uses dietary and physiological data to recommend exercise plans and meal options for optimal health. The most resource-intensive task the app would likely perform is to use open-pose like models to improve exercise posture.
From AirBnB's blog, they moved away from React Native because they had to maintain 3 different codebases as they had started with native development. We are just about starting and have experience with React but are open to considering others like Flutter.
I think you're asking two different questions, you can use tensorflow-js in any js framework. If you want my opinion: go with React, there's simply more documentation on using tensorflow with React, and you already have experience with it. Just don't start developing three different codebases, that's not a matter of React/TF vs Flutter/TF, it's a matter of organisation.
I'm creating a new mobile app in RN which will require a login page. I can build all of this from scratch of course but I wanted to find out, based on the latest technology and trends, the most common tools, technologies and aproaches that RN devs are currently using for this. Essentially, if you were to create a brand new mobile app in RN today, what approaches and components would you use? My preference is to implement the login module for free, except for my labor, unless there's a high quality aternative for a few dollars per month, which saves a significant amount of implementation/troubleshooting/overhead/etc that a lot of RN devs are currently leveraging.
Your question is quite open ended but here you go.
UI Components
You need your new app to look good and user friendly, these two are what i would almost always choose between they provide all the components you need to have an elegant app and are light-weight dependencies:
react-native-paper
react-native-elements
State Management
Almost always you will need to share certain values, arrays, objects, etc. between components, to achieve this i usually decide between:
React Context - if i am building a simple small scale application.
React Redux - if the application needs to be highly scalable and need enable certain features Redux can help with (i.e. offline application usage, etc.)
Note: i would highly recommend you using Redux for state management, true the boilerplate is a pain but it will help you greatly on the long run.
Miscellaneous
Expo - Pretty much most of my applications use expo platform, i would say your application development timeline is cut by 1/3 using it, however the greatest downside would be the inability to integrate native modules with it like how you use link in a normal react native application.
Axios - For any HTTP related requests
React Navigation - For handling my application routing and navigation
Bonus
If you are actually just starting a new application, i have just finished setting up a quick boilerplate that pretty much uses all the technologies i mentioned above. as well as pre-setup authentication flow, theming (Light and Dark theme) and some extra stuff!
Check it out on GitHub :)
Hope this Helps!
What is the difference between React-native and Flutter technically?
Both technologies seem to do relatively the same thing, and Flutter even admits that it takes inspiration from React: faq
This is even more obvious when they list the same features and have almost the same syntax (StatefulWidget vs Component class).
Similarly to AngularDart being a Dart implementation of Angular; is it right to assume that Flutter is a Dart implementation of React?
Architecturally, React Native (RN) and Flutter are very similar.
What Flutter calls a "Widget" is the strict equivalent to React's "Component". That's what Flutter means when it says its inspired from React.
The difference between them lies in the other aspects of the frameworks:
Interpreted Javascript VS Compiled Dart
Flutter uses Dart, a typed language that offers both "Just in time" (JIT) and "Ahead of time" (AOT) compilation (with tree-shaking included)
In development, Flutter uses JIT compilation to empower hot-reload. And for production builds, it uses AOT compilation for better performances.
React-Native uses Javascript enhanced by some syntax sugar called JSX.
JSX being a different language, it compiles to JS, then evaluated at runtime.
Bridge to native VS Complete rewrite
React native is built on the top of native.
When using a button or a text in React Native, you are manipulating the official object used for native Android/iOS apps.
We can consider React as a common language between Android/iOS to declare layouts – but fundamentally the applications are different with potential inconsistencies.
It's is not true cross-platform. But at the same time, it allows better interoperability with native elements.
Flutter is the opposite. The goal of Flutter is to use as few native elements as possible.
Flutter requests to the OS a window, and then entirely manage its content using Dart and Skia (it's c++ graphics engine).
It has a few implications:
All the UI logic had to be reimplemented by Flutter. Be it scroll, touch events, animations, ...
The application is written entirely in Dart, even deep into the lower layers. It means that whatever the platform is, it's always the same code that is executed.
Potentially anything that can run Dart code and create a window can run Flutter and apps should work with little to no change. As such, web is in progress ( Hummingbird) and basic support of desktops is available.
To some extent, we can compare Flutter to a webview/game engine, but optimized for casual applications.
Remi already has a couple good points. I have one more.
Interpreted with bridges - vs. native and no bridges
Despite what the name might imply, React Native apps are not compiled to native code. React Native apps interpret Javascript code during runtime, and component updates in a React Native app go through a bridge to the native view counterpart. This might slow things down a little bit and be a bottleneck.
On the contrary, Flutter apps (on release mode) are compiled to native code and don't require a bridge for manipulating the UI. This in turn, at least in theory, will be more performant - there's no need to do roundtrips to the native land to make simple UI changes. Not to mention that release Flutter code is natively compiled and there are no interpreters involved.
Dance monkey, dance
Now that we know that release mode Flutter apps don't have an interpreter or the need for bridges for UI manipulations, let's see what those two things actually are in the first place.
We'll do this with a highly hypothetical example app. Our React Native app has a button that makes a monkey dance on the screen. In React Native, our button and the dancing monkey components are written in Javascript and React.
Interpreters
Since Javascript is not a first class language on Android or iOS, your React Native app includes a Javascript interpreter that interprets your Javascript code in runtime. Without the interpreter, you wouldn't be able to write apps with Javascript at all - even a simple console.log('Hello World!') wouldn't work.
According to the React Native docs, in "most cases", the Javascript code will be interpreted with JavascriptCore.
Bridges
Under the hood, React Native uses the native Android Views and iOS UIViews for displaying UI components (such as dancing monkeys) on the screen. But since the UI parts of the Android and iOS SDKs don't use Javascript, you can't make the monkey dance by using Javascript alone.
This is where a bridge comes into play. On the other side of the bridge are your React Native components and logic, written in Javascript. On the opposite side, we have the host Android/iOS app that renders native views into the screen.
From now on, let's call the two sides of the bridge as the Javascript land and the native land.
So, what happens when the user clicks on our "dance, monkey, dance!" button?
The native Android/iOS view dispatches an onclick event, which goes over the bridge to the Javascript land.
Our onclick listener written in Javascript gets invoked. It is a simple call that toggles a boolean inside the component. Something along the lines of setState(() {isMonkeyDancing = true}) or similar.
React sees that something has changed. It comes up with an updated representation of UI elements that has a dancing monkey. The representation is just a tree of plain Javascript objects that describes the updated state of the UI.
The Javascript object tree gets serialized and sent over the bridge to the native land.
The host app receives the serialized object tree and deserializes it. Now it can update the native Android/iOS view to match the deserialized UI representation. Our monkey is now dancing and our user is eternally happy.
So in this example, one button click required going over the bridge two times.
Actually, it's three - just simply rendering a button initially is a call across the bridge itself.
In an app that is more than just one button and a dancing monkey, you're likely to go over the bridge a lot more. And every time you do, it requires serializing data and sending it over from one side to the another.
This is slower than just coming up with the UI representation and updating the UI with that directly. Additionally, there's a cost of interpreting Javascript in runtime compared to having the code compiled ahead of time.
The bottom line
Since Flutter is essentially a portable rendering engine, Flutter doesn't need a bridge to do an UI update. And because of that, UI updates, at least in theory, are faster. That's one reason why building apps with complex animations or things like Flare, SpriteWidget, or even games would be more lucrative with Flutter compared to React Native.
And because Flutter on release mode is AOT compiled, Flutter doesn't need an interpreter either. That's the difference between Flutter and React Native.
Flutter vs React Native: A Developer’s Perspective
React Native by Facebook and Flutter by Google – two hot cross-platform app development technologies creating a buzz. In this post, we will compare both of them in detail from a developer’s perspective.
What’s Flutter and React Native?
React Native is a project started by Facebook internally that they open-sourced in 2015. On the other side is Flutter, a project started by Google which they have been heavily promoting since I/O 2017. Both of these technologies help app developers build cross-platform apps faster by using a single programming language. React Native is already a mature tool and has a huge community, but Flutter also started seeing huge adoption rates since 2017. In this post, we will compare each of them using ten criteria:
Programming language
Technical architecture
Installation
Setup and project configuration
UI components and development API
Developer productivity
Community support
Testing support
Build & release automation support
DevOps and CI/CD support
Programming Language
The key benefit of using a cross-platform mobile app development technology is the ability to use a single programming language to develop apps for both iOS and Android.
React Native — JavaScript
Flutter — Dart
Installation
The installation method should be straightforward without having too many complicated steps so that it could be easily learned by developers that are just starting with it.
React Native - NPM
Flutter - Binary Download from Source
UI Components and Development API
React Native - Less Components
Flutter - Rich in Components
Conclusion
React Native and Flutter both have their pros and cons. Some of the industry experts have predicted that Flutter is the future of mobile app development. Considering the comparison above, it’s clear that Flutter has entered the cross-platform mobile development race very strongly. Let’s not predict the future but wait and watch!
If you learn both technology in deep. So, you will find big differences:
Programming language- Java Script and Dart
Technical architecture- Flex and Skia.
UI components and development API: Widget in flutter but views in React native.
Developer productivity: Debugging is very easy in Flutter.
Community: Big Community support in React Native.
Documentation & Toolkit: Flutter team have created simple duc for all widgets.
Testing support: Flutter providing testing libs.
DevOps and CI/CD: Flutter Providing CI/CD supports.
There are more difference between React Native and Flutter that you can read her.
Say I wanted to build something like a 2D side-scroller game. Would React Native be suitable performance-wise? E.g., can I use OpenGL-acceleration for it? Or would it probably be slower than just using WebGL and HTML5?
Researched some more and came up with this information:
Apparently there is a GLView which holds a WebGL context:
https://docs.expo.io/versions/latest/sdk/gl-view.html
On that page it says this:
Any WebGL-supporting library that expects a WebGLRenderingContext
could be used. Some times such libraries assume a web JavaScript
context (such as assuming document). Usually this is for resource
loading or event handling, with the main rendering logic still only
using pure WebGL. So these libraries can usually still be used with a
couple workarounds. The Expo-specific integrations above include
workarounds for some popular libraries.
Also a Twitter comment from Expo which mentions 'games' specifically:
Expo Graphics gives you the power of GL combined with Expo+React Native. It
is the foundation for image filters, games, and special effects.
And there should be a demo here:
https://github.com/gre/gl-react
Not much projects listed there which use React Native to build a game. Still, there being a WebGL context interface to a native OpenGL acceleration gives rise to hope.
I've used react-native-webgl to build a minesweeper game. This library has provided the performance gain I needed to render a 16x30 grid of cells with quick transitions from one state to another. In some circumstances the game needs to re-render dozens or even hundreds of cells at once. Default React Native renderer is not fast enough to do that without user noticing the delay.
Note that while react-native-webgl solves the performance problem, it requires you to write low level code such as creating shaders, manage the vertices etc. And I haven't found libraries built on top of react-native-webgl that would work for my task.
So if you really need or want to use React Native for your game, use react-native-webgl or GLView for Expo. Otherwise use a different technology like Unity.
You can find the source code of my game here.