With my company, our users have always begged for an Mac OSX and iOS app. We never provided it, because we have zero-internal expertise with any of the technologies involved. We could contract, or hire for that specific purpose, but the moment that team member was gone the project would be dead and out of sync with the rest of the codebase.
The codebase isn't lightweight to begin with, and duplicating it for a native app that maybe only one person could maintain was a non-starter.
What'd be a good example for the kind of lightweight project that can reasonable be duplicated for Native Mobile, Native Tablet, Native Desktop, & Web Browsers?
> We never provided it, because we have zero-internal expertise with any of the technologies involved.
Couldn't your team learn the technologies? These days there is an abundance of resources available (online tutorials, books, bootcamps, etc), especially for ecosystems as popular as the Appleverse.
I can't pretend to know your situation, but as a reference point we had an iOS project come up at work a couple years ago and I was able to pick up Objective-C and the Apple libs in a few weeks while still being productive on other projects. I followed Apple's official tutorials[0] and built some toy apps, then learned the rest as I went on the real project. This is after having never owned an iDevice and doing mostly web and devops work in scripting languages for many years prior. A few peers of various experience levels were able to ramp up in about the same amount of time, so I'm not special.
> With my company, our users have always begged for an Mac OSX and iOS app. We never provided it, because we have zero-internal expertise with any of the technologies involved. We could contract, or hire for that specific purpose, but the moment that team member was gone the project would be dead and out of sync with the rest of the codebase.
I don't see how that is any different. If your Windows team members all left, that project would be dead or out-of-sync too. Wouldn't you replace valued team members who leave, in both cases? Or is this a concern that you won't be able to find developers willing to work with OSX and/or iOS tech?
> With my company, our users have always begged for an Mac OSX and iOS app.
Repeating this again because this should be telling. If your getting feedback begging for an OSX and iOS app, there's probably a number of really good reasons for that.
> What'd be a good example for the kind of lightweight project that can reasonable be duplicated for Native Mobile, Native Tablet, Native Desktop, & Web Browsers?
Spotify, Slack, Twitter, Facebook, any streaming video service (Hulu, Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, HBO GO), etc.
Note that I'm not using "lightweight" to mean "small weekend project", but to mean "less complex than the codebase needed to reproduce these features in a browser or Electron browser".
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If you are truly a small company / startup, and you truly have to support all platforms with a small team, then sure Electron makes sense despite all the drawbacks. I totally understand that.
But I usually hear this excuse from big companies, that still want to perceive themselves as small, but aren't. Slack is a billion dollar company, they are not a small business / small startup. If a company is large enough to have more than two people working in HR full time, then they are probably big enough to do this stuff right. "We're a small team" simply isn't true for them.
The codebase isn't lightweight to begin with, and duplicating it for a native app that maybe only one person could maintain was a non-starter.
What'd be a good example for the kind of lightweight project that can reasonable be duplicated for Native Mobile, Native Tablet, Native Desktop, & Web Browsers?
Atom?
VSCode?
Slack?