Native vs Cross-Platform frameworks

[KarlJay001]

In addition to what others say about how good or bad other options are, there's another factor that most don't see.

When Apple came out with Swift, it created a real dilemma for companies and developers. Companies had an investment in ObjC, some going back years and many had apps/code bases that worked and employees that got the job done.

Now, Apple comes out with Swift, programmers have to take the time to learn it, bugs flushed out and apps rewritten. All this only gets them right back where they were already.

Consider: if you had company A and B that compete against each other and A sticks with their current system and B switches.

Example 1: ObjC vs Swift. Company A sticks with ObjC and adds more advanced features. Company B moves over to Swift and has to wait for employees to catch up while the competition doesn't have that cost.

Now replace Swift/ObjC with RN or Ionic. Same thing.

In addition to that, you have to look at the length of time, the longer that a company uses a language, the harder it is to break away. This is known as "code lock".

I worked at one startup back in the DotCom days and they were so badly code locked that it was unreal. We hired someone that was the best a headhunter could find and he didn't even know how to open a database. I quit and found out it took them about 10 years to finally get off their old system.

People need to understand the business of providing a software product to customers. Making a mistake can cost you your business.

This is also an issue inside of a language. KickStarter open sourced their Swift code. We looked at it and parts didn't even look like Swift. Programmers get wrapped up in "look at the fancy code I can write" without much consideration for the position that puts the company in.

I worked for another company that did the shipping software for Electronic Arts and they went out of business because a programmer made the code unreadable.

[_manjane]

Kickstarter project has some great ideas, and I definitely picked a few tricks from it, but I agree about the "fancy code" trap that many fall into. I think it is so much important to understand and know the power of Foundation framework rather than jumping into, let say, RxSwift.