As a professional webdev software engineer, mobile is something that I am always curious about and want to tap into.
I am genuinely curious about the differences between these two types of development, and what skills are transferable and what not. For example:
- Deployment process (e.g. Web CI/CD vs Mobile gradual release)
- Error reporting
- Architecture (We tend to favor microservices for Web, but monolith for Mobile(?))
What do you think are similar and what are different?
Top comments (6)
Hm, not sure you have the right impression here. Eventually the client "packs" your Microservices together and something like CI also eventually leads to a release/deployment.
With native apps these steps simply happen earlier and are then bundled into the app.
Most importantly, though: If you aren't working with native apps yet, don't bother.
With TWA making PWAs available in stores, there is really no reason for mobile development anymore. Updates are a painful process until a new version propagates and users actually use newer versions. This is frustrating for the users as well. Additionally, actual space used on devices are often reported reasons to not use apps (anymore).
My conclusion from what is happening lately is: the future is web, not native apps.
Thanks for the insight! I totally get the frustration of propagating new versions.
Do you mind sharing some resources for PWAs?
This really depends on what you are currently working with technology wise. In theory every web app can become a PWA with a simple manifest and a service worker. I might be able to recommend something suited to your stack if you let me know.
Thanks! The stack I am most familiar with includes Ruby, React, Nodejs, Golang and Java.
Okay. So by "stack" people usually refer to a specific combination of OS, server, backend-language, and frontend-framework. But let's try this: for node, there is a handy little tool called create-pwa.
This walks you through the basic setup and leaves you with a good starting point. You will notice that PWAs are pretty straight forward and it is quite simple to make existing webapps to PWAs.
Nice! I don't really have a specific stack really, but seems like node is a good start. Appreciated 🙂