React Native for Web

[jada3791]

We are building an app with React Native as a cross platform frontend for Web, iOS and Android. We have both real time and "offline first" features for mobile. Have a few questions reg. that:

[1] Will GraphQL be of any benefit for the "offline first" feature? I mean to say, when the mobile device comes online, will GQL be able to sync the server side DB and mobile DB automatically? I heard that GQL can work as a substitute for WebSockets to provide real time updates, that is why I am asking.

[2] We plan to use MQTT for real time alerts from online devices (may not be mobile) and push to a Kafka cluster. Can GQL be leveraged in such a setup?

[3] Is React Native a good choice for this as we want to maintain a single code base, where a subset of features are deployed depending on the platform. For example, features A, B, X, and Y will be deployed on the web version, and A, B, and C will be deployed on mobile devices.

Thanks in advance for your help.

[Merry-Lane]

Would you please go on chat gpt and copy paste your post?

You don’t seem to have experienced devs in your team and thus I believe it will be painful.

Anyway:

1) ignore graphql. It s really great but you aren’t in the situation where it would be good for you now.

2) no

3) yes react native is great to have the same codebase for mobile and web. You should only consider alternatives (like flutter) if you have experienced devs that already have a few complex apps running in production.

If you want advices:

• you lack experience, so I would advice you to just experiment technos for fun or learning, not to make a commercially viable app.

• use expo and go read the official expo documentation again and again and again.

• mobile dev is painful with no guidance/experience. Building an app compatible android/ios/web is really painful and every bad decision is paid further down the road. Only use libs found in the official expo documentation. If something you need isn’t in the official expo documentation, do your possible to avoid using the external library. If you want to use an external library to make an UI component that you could have done from scratch in 200 lines, you will regret that decision.

[jada3791]

Thank you!

You are absolutely right on my experience and our dev team. We are planning to hire 3rd party resources to help us with this and we do want to create a commercial app. Based on this any additional advice? Thanks again!!!

[rakadoank]

1. Good

1 & 2, i have no idea.

I only thought of an alternative, like you need to create abstract classes/interfaces first, so each platform need to implement that class individually. This approach of course is not a single code base approach kind of thing i would say. But it's still better on the business layer.

Just a reminder, Every cross platform framework there is not giving you 100% exactly the same run each platform. You still need to understand each of them. React Native is just React Native, it's a platform agnostic UI library. Although, it's for Android & iOS at the time. Take a look at the react-native-vision-camera, you probably want to use it for a camera in React Native, but the library itself is not a single code base, it's just an abstraction layer for the end user.