from Hacker News

Progressively Enhanced Turbo Native Apps in the App Store

by joemasilotti on 2/9/23, 5:31 PM with 43 comments

  • by ghiculescu on 2/10/23, 12:45 AM

    I've launched 3 Turbo Native apps to the iOS and Android stores. I found it 80% awesome, 20% frustrating. Of that 20%, some was bugs or missing features in the frameworks, many of which have been resolved.

    But mostly it was because expectations not matching reality. When I first heard about Turbo Native I read the pitch as "write all your app on web, and get native free". (Maybe that was my optimism.) In reality you really do need to think about native all the time. You can do your development in the browser, but for almost any app you'll need to at least test in the simulator, and you should test on device. Also, you will have to write native code at some point.

    This is not a problem if you have native developers on your team, or if you want to learn Kotlin and Swift, or if you work with a consultant like Joe. It is a bummer if you want to make the one-person app that Rails always talks about. For me the frustrating thing was that I wasn't using these languages often - I wasn't writing native code every day. So when I did need to write/debug native code, half the time was spent remembering how Swift is different to Ruby and how to use Android Studio.

    All that said, I still think Turbo Native is a game changer for B2B apps. It's much better than writing 2 native apps from scratch. It's just not a silver bullet!

    I also think for a long time the governance of the native projects wasn't ideal, in the sense that it was just whoever at Basecamp had some time to work on it (mostly Jay Ohms - thanks Jay!!). It's exciting to see that Joe has been made a maintainer - well earned, and hopefully it results in some more issues being closed and PRs being shipped :)

  • by jstummbillig on 2/9/23, 7:15 PM

    Mostly I found Turbo Native is lacking a good minimal walkthrough from rails to shipping on android/ios. To me, looking at it from afar, it's entirely unclear the how much native dev is required to make it even walk.

  • by bradgessler on 2/9/23, 10:30 PM

    If you're a SwiftUI developer I have an issue open at https://github.com/hotwired/turbo-ios/issues/8 to get Turbo SwiftUI off the ground. I have it working in one of my projects, but I'm not a Swift developer so it's pretty much a hack job and doesn't have the APIs I'd like.

    I've talked to a few folks about it and have heard responses ranging from "it's a bad idea/can't be done" (mainly because of SwiftUI bugs) to "why would you want to do that?". I think it would be amazing to have a declarative of building out a Hotwire Rails application inside of iOS. Bonus if the Turbo SwiftUI component could run on macOS.

  • by jack_riminton on 2/9/23, 6:30 PM

    I feel like Turbo Native has gone under the radar for a while. Would be good to hear more stories of the pros and cons

  • by Alifatisk on 2/9/23, 8:38 PM

    What a refreshing article, the whole hotwire ecosystem is kind off interesting.

  • by hokumguru on 2/10/23, 2:08 AM

    For those interested but not completely on board with still maintaining native apps check out this project in dev by software mansion for react native: https://github.com/software-mansion-labs/react-native-turbo-...

    I got it up and running with expo in an hour and it’s solved many problems.

  • by canadiantim on 2/9/23, 7:53 PM

    Anything like this for e.g. python? or other web apps?

  • by flohofwoe on 2/10/23, 8:21 AM

    > you can push an update to your website and your mobile app gets new features for free

    ...has Apple changed its stance on adding features without going through review? I thought that's prohibited (because at least for games that's a big no-no).

  • by graypegg on 2/10/23, 3:30 AM

    I may have missed something, but is turbo-native what was called Hotwire strada at some point?

  • by glangenderfer on 2/9/23, 9:40 PM

    why use this instead of a progressive web app?

    https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Progressive_web...

  • by sublinear on 2/9/23, 8:00 PM

    ... I thought we stopped calling things "turbo", "hyper", etc. back in the 90s

  • by FpUser on 2/9/23, 11:10 PM

    >"Turbo Native is a small framework to build high-fidelity hybrid apps."

    Is it me or there are way too many buzzwords in a single sentence? And "high-fidelity hybrid" is a real pearl.