Mobile Engineering
Questions You'll Answer
When should we build a Progressive Web App (PWA) instead of a Mobile App?
Do we actually need a mobile app, or do we just want an icon on the home screen?
Are we prepared to support 3 different versions of the app simultaneously because users refuse to update?
What is the difference between Native (Swift/Kotlin) and Cross-Platform (React Native/Flutter)?
Why can't we just "hotfix" a bug on mobile like we do on the web?
How much engineering time are we budgeting for "React Native Upgrades" and breaking changes?
What You'll Learn
Understand the massive trade-offs between "Native" (Performance) vs "Cross-Platform" (Speed) vs "PWA" (Sanity).
Realize that "Maintenance" is the biggest cost in mobile dev, not "Building".
Learn why "Hybrid" apps are often the worst of both worlds.
Stop building apps just because other agencies or projects have one.
Hard Truths
Everyone wants an 'App' for the prestige, ignoring that a PWA solves 99% of the use case for 10% of the cost.
On the web, you deploy when you want. On Mobile, you deploy when Apple & Google review your binary. Maybe 24 hours, maybe a rejection!.
Critical bug in production? On the web, you fix it in 5 minutes. On mobile, you fix it and wait 3 days for users to download the update (if they ever do).
React Native/Flutter is great until you need a specific native feature. Then you end up writing 3 codebases: JS/Dart, Swift, and Kotlin.
The speed of React Native evolution is a double-edged sword. You are always one `npm install` away from a broken build that takes 3 days to debug.
It works on your developer's iPhone 15 Pro. It crashes on DS's Pixel 10 Pro. Welcome to fragmentation hell.