Easiest way to make a mobile app with Phoenix on the backend?

I believe web stack is always the right way to go:

  1. Low learning curve
  2. High velocity
  3. Write/build everywhere, and re-using code between platforms
  4. Not likely to die for a long time

My choice could be providing React Native or PWA. You could share as many as codes you want, and build different view if requires. It’s brilliant. Code sharing on the client side is really really useful. Typically if we introduce an API, we either:

  1. Implement at backend side, which is clean but introduces the risk of enforcing client side. It’s not extensible.
  2. Implement on every client-side separately. It could be Java / Swift / JavaScript at the same time. There’s a lot of duplication and ad-hoc solutions.
  3. Implement a bunch of multiple similar API for different platforms.

With React / React Native you can build every platform with totally different appearances, while most of the business logic is shared.

Another thing is both language and platform dies or zombies pretty fast. While Google abandons projects A LOT.

JS is not dying at least before WASM become mainstream. While with platform dying if you have a bunch of React / React Native shared code it’s probably you can take bring those code to any new popular platform without pain.

React Native is nice. The problem is, it is not a silver bullet. Lots of quirky things to do in order to make the mobile apps run correctly, especially if we are talking about the hardware.

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@igor @AstonJ Let’s set up a way to collaborate on this, should we set up a channel in the Elixir Slack? I’m @brybry in the Elixir Slack.

Sorry for not getting back to you Bryan, I’ve been so busy :icon_redface:

Unfortunately I am not on Slack/any chat rooms, but we have group PMs here if that’s any good? Or, if you prefer something more public, we could start a thread in the #your-libraries-projects:projects section :slight_smile:

Let’s make it public, go ahead and start the thread.

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Ok done :023:

An iOS / Android - Phoenix tutorial (WIP)

I’ve made the first post a wiki so that you can edit it as you see fit :slight_smile:

Is the title ok btw? (Feel free to change it) :blush:

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I’ve just started developing a mobile app with React native, and I will run Phoenix in the backend. It will use realtime features for messaging and location. I can give more feedback here once I have something more concrete developed

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