Mobile & Desktop Apps
Through the magic of JavaScript, you can get things running anywhere these days. Using web technologies to make apps for smartphones or desktop lets you bring concepts alive quickly, and to the highest quality. You can prototype an idea fast, or make the public release of your product confident that it will run well on every platform.
React Native Mobile Apps
React Native apps bring an impressive level of portability to mobile software development, with the same code being used to generate a release for Android and iOS. Some day, you might have the motivation, and the budget, to have two standalone code bases for each respective platform.
For many, React Native’s ease and speed of development is optimal. Especially when you don’t know how popular your product is going to be yet.
Using Expo, you can trial, and demonstrate, your app on real devices with ease, without needing to launch on any store or reveal anything you don’t want to.
Electron Desktop Apps
If you need something that runs on user machines rather than in the browser, Electron can be a good starting point, whether you want to prototype or make the first generation of a product, in order to see what appetite is out there. They combine system-native capabilities such as saving files or running local databases with web-based user interfaces.
Though it continues to be good enough for Slack and Spotify, for example, there are some tradeoffs to take into account, such as the bundling of a browser to render the UI.
Newer solutions rely on the system’s own browser instead, such as:
- Neutralino - essentially a bundled website with no local backend
- Tauri - web UI, Rust backend
- Walls - web UI, Go backend
These can be explored too, and the more modest demands placed on the user’s system may matter to you.