Seems iOS devs have pretty much zero interest in Android development....on the other hand Android devs have some but really not that much interest either in iOS! Think this is mostly about managing our cognitive load rather than necessarily being entrenched in our own platform
I wonder how much of it has to do with how tribal we all are about our phones. People pretty distinctly become android people or iOS people. It wouldn`t surprise me if that just extends to mobile development as well. Crazy because learning new stacks is great!
I am a believer that Kotlin MultiPlatform will eventually drive mobile development to a very safe normality with 80% shared code and just 20% platform-specific UI code. We are still quite far from this awareness, and there is still some community work needed to achieve it.
One thing that saddens me now, though, is the fact that I can no longer disappoint the UX peeps by saying it`s too difficult to do the styling they requested. I`ll miss those little sad, heart broken faces
Java (for android), Objective C (for iOS) missing
Ah well, I thought I missed the news here. Maybe 2022.
Is direct Swift/Kotlin interop in the works? This would be huge for usability, mapping generics directly alone..
Not sure, it could be for example that a lot of the unused / non-meaningful apps are created with a specific framework. Another thing is how new all these apps that count into stats are - maybe all Cordova apps are ones that have been in the store for years with no updates
Play Store has a significantly worse spam/low-effort/clone app problem so it skews these numbers significantly IMO.
KMMs memory management, threading and mapping to Swift still needs work. Promising tech tho!
Appfigures says they scan "every free iOS and Android app". I`d like to see something like stats for the top 1k, top 10k apps. Or apps that have 1000+ downloads. With the number of apps in the stores, 98% is probably useless, it shouldn`t all be weighed equally.
iOS devs are also I think more vehemently against use of cross platform frameworks and, as such, I had thought they`d have greater interest then in Kotlin Multiplatform (which is just targeting non-UI code)..but don`t see a great deal of that (yet anyway!) 100% This is why I like Flutter now
Yeah I agree. That said on my first commercial flutter project and am actually enjoying seeing both platforms and have got both an iPhone and Android device plugged in and debugging in semi realtime. Learning lots about iOS as I go which can only be a benefit.
I do native development for both iOS and Android. It is a challenge to keep up as things are moving very fast on both platforms, but if you want to follow the UX I think it is the best choice. The change from Java to Kotlin and Objective C to swift has made things a lot easier ;)
I`ve done a few iOS apps, mainly because KMM makes it simpler to do the logic once, then just slap a UI on top of it. But it`s a serious cognitive overload. Compose is making it better, since I can "think" pretty much the same way with it and SwiftUI.
