How I got into mobile development
This article was written at 2017. Published in 2020.
Although I wanted to get into mobile app development for a quite some time now, I had no time to get my hands on Java/Kotlin or Swift with the work and studies (Not a good excuse. I know). That’s when the company I worked at the time, got a mobile project and I was assigned to the team. This was a greenfield project and their intention was to do a complimentary mobile app for their already existing web app.
“Here’s a framework that you’ve never heard of. Let’s use that”
Actually they were not sure which framework to go with. So they wanted us to do some POCs with different frameworks so they can get a feel and at the same time we can evaluate the feasibility and developer experience. Since their web application used Angular 2 at the time (ng2 was in beta and very unstable. Guess they really wanted it to be future proof eh ?) they were mostly interested to try a cross platform mobile framework that is based on ng2.
So in the initial meeting our client suggested that we should do the first POC with NativeScript. To be honest we hadn’t even heard of the framework before the meeting. It wasn’t very popular back then either. But you know how these client meetings go in service companies. We said we have done multiple projects in Nativescript before and we can work on a simple POC.
NativeScript is what I do all day yo! *cough* *cough*
The meeting was over and the reality kicked in. We had 4 weeks to learn Angular 2, NativeScript and deliver the POC. We knew Angular 1 and React back then but Angular 2 was completely different animal.
Honestly we weren’t convinced after the initial research about Nativescript since there weren’t many apps build on top of NativeScript nor an enthusiastic community backing it up.
“Let’s make a mobile app using a brand new framework that is based on a brand new framework”
yey! -_-
Anyway, we somehow managed to deliver the NativeScript POC on time but us nor our customers were happy with it. There were loads of limitations preventing us from building what we actually wanted. More on this later. So we had to ditch NS.
The second framework we wanted to try was a framework called Fuse Tools. Neat framework that focus on user interactions. Couple of people from fuse tools were helping us to do our POC as they had their own language called “UX Markup” to do UIs. Too steep learning curve and lack of community behind it stopped us from going forward with this.
Although not Angular based, React Native was in our radar because of the gaining popularity. So we kind of convinced them to try React Native. I had prior experience with React so, there weren’t much to learn. While RN was very new(~RN 0.23) back then, it was very customizable, there were loads of open-source projects and there was a massive community behind it. We’ve realized React Native is just what we needed. So we settled for React Native. Long story short, I’m still doing react and react native (among other things: serverless and dApps ftw) after 2 years.
And that is how I got into the mobile development. Now I’ve fallen in love with React, React Native and pretty much everything around it. Along the way, I’ve also learned a lot about Mobile development and cross platform development in general. So I’m planning on writing couple of blogs on different topics related to mobile development and web development in future. Check other blogs in this account too. Also I have an open source project that I have done called React Native Mentions. Check it out here: https://github.com/harshq/react-native-mentions
See you with something new. Adios.
