Dopes anyone know any good mobile app frameworks that are open source. I would like to be able to develop from windows, but move over to a mac (I own one) when I build for IOS. I want raw NATIVE ui provided by SwiftUI and whatever android has (material design I think).
I’m outta that racket, but way back when I used flutter/Dart, specifically because multiplatform support was a must and having dedicated Android/iOS/web devs wasn’t in the budget. no idea how the landscape is now, I imagine react native is the thing. as to performance, it was way faster than the alternatives of its time (meteor, ionic, etc), but still laged a bit behind native app development.
I firmly believe you should develop apps natively for that platform. That means jetpack-compose for android, and swift ui for iOS.
These write-once-for-all platforms layers are always bloated, slow, unoptimized, and behind the official native specs.
Decent programmers know how to learn new languages and frameworks as necessary, and most of the concepts are the same across programming languages. Nothing near as difficult as learning a real language.
I think it depends a lot on what you are building.
For bigger projects and apps leveraging the mobile platform I’m 100% with you.
These kinds of frameworks can still be a good fit for a quick MVP demo, as a stepping stone for porting an existing web app, or if all you really want is a glorified web view (or are PWAs enough for the last one these days?)
Specifically RN is in terrible shape and IMO something to avoid though.
Yes, I hate the bloat aswell! However, I really like that native feel(idk why its just SO nice). I was planning on making my own sketchy framework using the Haxe programming language, which compiles to other platforms, so performance wouldn’t be a problem; however, it doesn’t support swift or objc, I still haven’t found a suitable solution.
Maybe you should have a look in Kotlin Multiplaform or Compose Multiplatform. However they rely on low-level layers, so you won’t be able to use SwiftUI maybe. Such cross-platform frameworks won’t be able to use directly system UI frameworks at least for iOS due to compilation limitations.
Godot?
Its gaming framework, but has all the classic UI controls, its open source and multi platform.
I think that “native” controls require also native toolkits and SDKs, so you lose portability.
WxWidgets???
best comment so far!
What are your definitions of good and open source?
There’s: Qt, wxWidgets, Flutter, JavaFx, …
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_platform-independent_GUI_libraries
