What would you use today for a greenfield mobile app?

Question

If you're bootstrapping a new app, what would you use for developing the mobile app and the backend? Is React Native still the best shortcut for a cross platform code base? What backend is easiest to handle a login and some CRUD operations?

admissionsguy · Accepted Answer

I faced this choice recently and opted for React Native, without Expo or anything higher level.
In retrospect, it was a perfect choice. Knowing React, there was literally no learning curve, the apps feel very snappy (most mobile apps suck in this respect, and I suspect the use of higher-level frameworks is the reason), and React in general is unexpectedly pleasurable to work with.
I always use PHP/Laravel for the back-end - since I know it well - it provides the login/CRUD stuff out of the box, but honestly, for a typical CRUD app is matters very little which back-end you use, as long as you keep it nice and clean (and write it yourself rather than use something like Firebase which, again, sucks).

byoung2 · Answer

Depends on the type of app. React Native might be better for something resource heavy like a video app (we use it at Cameo for mobile, and regular react for web), but if it is something like a todo list or email app, a wrapped webview would let you use the same codebase for web and mobile. For a backend, I'm partial to nodejs, it's nice having Javascript on both the frontend and backend. Something like Express or Restify is good for quickly setting up CRUD apps

Lionga · Answer

Imho Flutter creates much better apps with a better developer experience.

dave_sid · Answer

Xcode and Android Studio