Just my two cents: I'm currently building an app on the Shoutem platform, and have been required to extend one of the Shoutem extensions to do so. I have been in direct communication with the Shoutem team throughout this proces, and have gotten to know the platform intimately.
A month into it, I can honestly say I can't recommend using the platform (yet). While the idea is an interesting one, it's bloated, buggy, slow, and doesn't offer much over optimizing a website for mobile devices. That said, the team behind the platform is great, and I'm confident they'll work out the kinks over the coming months to make it more user/developer friendly.
It’s weird that the app they decided to showcase [1] using their product - has one stars as majority of ratings with a main reason of it crashing all the time. If that’s the best what they could have shown, I wonder how bad it can get then
I've used Shoutem's standalone UI library[1] for my last project but haven't used their platform as a whole. During that time, I found it painful to get it working.
Their documentation[2] wasn't great. It was out of date (missing component attributes, icons etc.) and lacked good examples. Often I would have to dig into the source to figure out obscure errors. When I first starting using @shoutem/ui, I couldn't use the latest version of React Native because they locked themselves into an experimental feature[3] which even until now, seems like it hasn't properly resolved.
Again. I can't comment on their platform but I didn't have a good time using their UI library. Had I known this, I would have just gone with NativeBase[4].
Expo is used to run/preview a React Native app where Shoutem is both a CMS that you can use to manage your app's data and a UI library that you can use to build your app.
While I like react and react native, i still think requireing to run a JS interpreter in order to run a native "like" app is still not good engineering practice. I'm betting on multi-platform-projects (MPP) with Kotlin and Kotlin-Native. Engineering wise much more sound, however the iOS and Android platform should have some more support for Reactive like UI's. Without needing JavaScript.
Pardon my ignorance, but isn't Flutter a little immature too? I remember playing with it and Dart a while ago, still didn't seem to have everything necessary to ship something to production.
With that said, I think Dart isn't really a language popular enough to replace JS in big projects right now.
Looks very interesting, however you risk being rejected on the Apple app store because of this guideline:
“4.2.2 Other than catalogs, apps shouldn’t primarily be marketing materials, advertisements, web clippings, content aggregators, or a collection of links”.
Those are options with less functionality, it's not a tiered price, so you'll have to be sure your app will be a financial succes before you start developing.
I'm not sure why I should have myself forced into another framework, when I could have just imported those components if I wanted them. Also, aren't many such components not available as open source already?
It's not a framework, the UI library has React Native components that help you build your app. You can use their Builder to integrate the CMS, but that's another thing.
We tried working with it and this isn't really a thing - the support is non-existent, the documentation is lacking.
When contacted, they admitted that the only apps published using the Shoutem platform are ones that the company custom-built for some clients (their services are $10k+ a pop).
It sounds like this is just a marketing ploy and a way to get around Apple's new rules about app-builders.
Folks at Shoutem poured years of effort into building this platform and it definately shows. The product is really solid and I recommend taking a better look at it if you're planning to build a mobile app.
A month into it, I can honestly say I can't recommend using the platform (yet). While the idea is an interesting one, it's bloated, buggy, slow, and doesn't offer much over optimizing a website for mobile devices. That said, the team behind the platform is great, and I'm confident they'll work out the kinks over the coming months to make it more user/developer friendly.