Even if react-native were to "lose" it will be years going down as it was years going up, there is never a cliff really for adoption, so I think you could be right and even if you were wrong it's not like all the sudden everyone leaves the room and turns the lights off.

The competition isn't a bad thing either, even as it stands. Perhaps seeing what true "all platforms one codebase" looks like (with great tooling) as Flutter has now is the kick in the pants react-native needs to finish it's original cross-platform innovation and get the rest of the platforms going. I know for a fact Microsoft is very heavily invested in the javascript ecosystem (typescript, VS Code, reactxp etc) and they contribute a lot. With their recent behavior (mostly positive? so weird to say it but it's true!) they may have enough clout to steer react-native for that next step it needs to take, if they don't mind the Apple platforms despite their history there. The alternative being google (another closed behemoth) for developers, seeing a Microsoft led fully cross-platform competitor to Google's Flutter might just be the next big battle.

Or it could be the current modules-everywhere not-really-cross-platform mess we've already got and we keep muddling through :-)

I'm watching too. I work with Invertase and am the maintainer of react-native-firebase, react-native-device-info and a couple others. react-native-firebase is from Invertase and they also work on FlutterFire (which you could think of as "flutter-firebase".

I also have a cross-platform app written against reactxp / react-native APIs.

So I'm definitely paying attention.

Flutter is only getting adopted now, so high-paying (typically a bit more conservative clients) as middle or late adopters will not see it yet at all, it's too new.

But it's coming. I'd prefer if my tech bet on react-native was going to win but I'd put $1 on Flutter now. The management structure of react-native is effectively non-existent and the "core" only cares about what is vital for Facebook, so they resist attempts at true cross platform (the non-iOS apple platforms like tvOS, macOS, watchOS, ipadOS - seriously it's a fork?, the web - seriously it's a 3rd-party library to support web?, and windows - seriously it's a fork?).

To me, that means it's dead in the future. If Flutter treats all platforms 1st class it will win even with the choice of Dart. It will do so for the same reason react-native became popular in the first place (truly cross-platform and open...) but with current innovation vs react-native stagnation.

Pains me to say it.

Does not stop them from trying, and I guess if they want to pursue anti-competitive practices resulting in their own eventual demise, good on them

I enjoy privacy and I agree with you personally, but the numbers indicate you and I are rarities.
Most people trade away their privacy happily. The more important point is that Apple does only lip service on the privacy front, and for email control you can use '+' suffix addressing yes?

It's a massive pain in the butt to integrate Apple Sign-In, and as a developer that maintains a library to make it slightly easier (https://github.com/invertase/react-native-apple-authentication/) I can say no one would offer it if Apple did not strictly require it.

The API is not great, they did not backport it to their older operating systems, and in my experience not even apple users prefer it over google or facebook auth. And Apple has shown that while they won't decrypt your phone they are more than happy to share your cloud data, which would include these auth trails.

It is one of the most obvious examples of how they use their monopolistic gatekeeper power

I definitely remember ftp-ing slack 1.44 imgs and being really really happy when as a starving college student I could both afford something that could use the SMP kernels, and that the feature existed. Linux working well meant you didn't have to go to the freezing cinderblock box that was the computer lab at the time in order to do unix comp sci homework. The good ol' days

Anyone remember hacking your own XF86Config modelines to overclock your monitor and get a few more characters in? You know, back when we had good eyesight haha

Kudos to you, that's a big investment of heart right there.

If you haven't tried Kipo and the age of Wonderbeasts it's great for the whole family. On Netflix

Some of the Studio Ghibli stuff can go young (Totoro?)

Good luck!

DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS

hahahah - your userid is low enough that should be a fun memory

No, but really, I'm just happy there are potentially two viable solutions in the ecosystem for full crossplatform. Hopefully there will be even more, it's clearly a need. And hopefully google doesn't stuff this one up and close it down in a year.

In my opinion more ways for devs to build truly cross-platform apps is great, so this is great

Just wanted to mention that there is great commercial success at the moment doing similar with react-native and the electron framework, with examples being Spotify and Discord and Skype. You may have personal feelings and technical feelings about those specific apps but it's hard to argue they are not viable commercial successes

Also worth noting none of those rely on Linux packagers to get their job done. They are bespoke downloads with internal uploaders

But for devs really trying to get total platform coverage (including mobile) there are a couple real options now, which is nice.

Nah, you haven't been paying attention to where the leading edge went I think. They're doing some interesting things in mobile now that they've given up being the platform. They've pivoted to become toolsmiths (which they were actually not bad at by popularity though I personally hated them), and they're making all the tools open source. I find it hard to get worked up about that?

Okay, whippersnapper.

That was also the time Microsoft was sincerely evil. Went from the point where upgrading my install meant fresh floppy images from the slackware FTP site, up until about where Google decided to just fully ignore their phrase "Don't Be Evil" (that is, about 3 years ago?)

Now, for some strange reason they seem to have genuinely turned the page on that $%^& and are...doing some good things.

So maybe it's not ads? Maybe it's that in this strange alternate future I didn't expect myself to be in they are actually the leading edge of useful technology out of all the Big Tech Companies

So be it. And if they incorporate more memory safety in their OS and it sucks less, maybe I won't feel so sorry for people stuck using windows as their base OS :-)

Electron is bundling chunks of Chromium I think, and they are using it to do partial frame updates in order to increase performance without spinning up your fans. They are using those APIs because apparently macOS doesn't provide APIs to update part of a frame. Mozilla wrote up a good article on it as they just implemented it in Firefox (though I guess they might revert that!)

I wrote this up, works well for me https://askubuntu.com/question... :-)

Also, fastlane at least makes certificate handling just really really irritating as opposed to fully impossible

In general though, agreed. Working so hard to support what by my stats is just 20% of my users is really frustrating.

The APIs in question are apparently for doing partial updates in a frame, so as not to use too much power.

Firefox wrote up how and why they use them: https://mozillagfx.wordpress.c...

Chromium uses them as well, which is likely how they end up bundled into Electron https://github.com/electron/el...

This seems like something where Apple may actually have to relent here, until they have an API for partial compositing?

Oh no! That means I can't use 90+% of their public API then!

</cynicism> - I'm just so tired of seeing auto-generated useless API docs when I hunt for one of their symbols then resorting to stack overflow. Don't actually use undocumented APIs kids.