| ▲ | paxys 6 hours ago |
| And the “makes sense or not” part can change based on a bunch of factors. It’s actually pretty common for a new company to start fully native (only iOS, few features, limited scope), then switch ro react native/electron (need to support more surfaces, features are being developed too quickly), then back to fully native (can afford individual dev teams for each platform). |
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| ▲ | nfw2 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| The main cost of two engineering teams shipping identical products in my opinion isn't the cost of those extra engineers, it is in the product and organizational challenges of keeping those two products that need to be identical in sync. I am very bullish on coding agents but would be wary of this turning into a mess. |
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| ▲ | tcdent 32 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | But here's the thing, across operating systems the products should not be identical. When you get to the point that your have a significant enough number of users across multiple platforms, generalizing everything into a shared UX doesn't make sense; giving those classes of users the best experience requires embracing their platform. A simple example: Android has a system-wide convention for a `back` button. iOS has no such standard. Users on each platform have different expectations for how to navigate an app fundamentally, and holding tightly onto the concept of identical gives both camps a compromised experience. | | |
| ▲ | nfw2 3 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | There is an implication here that the back button is a microcosm that represents the differences holistically but it's not. It's a small one-off exception that doesn't even affect the design choices made for the various apps. As I open up app over app on my Android (Audible, Spotify, ChatGPT, etc.), they all have clear in-app "back" functionality where needed. No apps I have installed rely on the Android back button exclusively. Also, none of these apps have any design elements that follow Android's design language. | |
| ▲ | thm76 25 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | I took "identical" as in feature wise. The user should be able to accomplish the same things, no matter what platform they're using. I do think that the way the features are implemented should be platform dependent, i.e. use common UX pattern on each platform, fit in with the UI, and be good platform citizens. | | |
| ▲ | nfw2 a minute ago | parent | next [-] | | Why does Shopify need to use Apple's or Google's branded design language in their app? | |
| ▲ | ethin 13 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | The solution is to make the common features a part of a statically-linked library that you can pull into your apps. A web app is, IMO, never the answer when you want to address multiple audiences. It is bad for accessibility (because 99.999 percent of web app developers never consider accessibility) and it doesn't solve the problem that web apps are trying to solve (having 8 code bases all that have to remain in sync) because you will inevitably need your code to handle platform-specific differences, standards/conventions and whatnot. |
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| ▲ | nightpool 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | This is a great point that I wish the Shopify article went into in more depth! Would love to hear if they considered this | | | |
| ▲ | sarky-litso 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Assuming they have a robust feature flag and experiment pipeline in place they are trying to solve a much more complicated version of this | |
| ▲ | skydhash an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | > it is in the product and organizational challenges of keeping those two products that need to be identical in sync. They're two different platforms where the capabilities and UI patterns differs, so I don't see why they should be in sync. The web platform is not in sync with them. And using native features can give you a nice boost in maintenance and speed, unlike React Native where you always needs to align library semantics. | | |
| ▲ | nfw2 34 minutes ago | parent [-] | | The capabilities of Android and iOS don't meaningfully differ for the purposes of Shopify; Shopify doesn't need LIDAR. Most large brands throw the UI design patterns of the platforms out the window in favor of their own UI guidelines. Saying the web platform is not in sync with mobile is not a relevant metaphor to justify why Android and iOS should be considered separately. |
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| ▲ | embedding-shape 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Yeah, massive parts of our community and ecosystem miss that something can be right today, and wrong tomorrow, and having to change along with your users and needs is OK. You'll never be able to anticipate what the business needs in the future, so stop pretending your software design can be done once and then just coast on that, because that's typically not how a software project should be run long-term or even medium-term. |
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| ▲ | bluGill 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | The problem with tomorrow is sunk costs. There are many places I wish we had made a difference decision in the past - but we need to balance that with cost to make changes when what we have works okay. | | |
| ▲ | rafaelmn 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | There's also a recency bias, where you ignore how valuable some decision was in the past and ignore the fact that you maybe wouldn't even get to the place you are if "you made a different decision in the past". | | |
| ▲ | bluGill 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | I can't count how many times I've said "this is really bad, I it is worth rewriting to fix all the issues", only to discover that there were good reasons for all the past decisions and so we end up with the same mess as before - except that now I know what it must be that way. Not always, but very often people in the past had good reason for what they did. | | |
| ▲ | xp84 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | As relevant today as it was 26 years ago: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-... See also: Chesterton's Fence | |
| ▲ | edoceo 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Those are the comments that should persist in the code. I hate when the AI edits and removes my "why" comments. I want the refactor to make it less messy but keep why it's that kind of mess. | | |
| ▲ | bluGill 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Too Soon often we thought those were obvious and didn't comment. Meanwhile there are detailed comments about things nobody cares about. | | |
| ▲ | tisdadd an hour ago | parent [-] | | I just put a comment in yesterday for this very reason - there was a flag I had set to false, and then looking at the library docs for something else thought maybe it should be true but that doesn't work how I would have implemented it if I had created the library and written the docs how I did. It is a very capable library, and when I first started using it the docs were more Oracle docs looking - but I could find what I wanted easily. Now, it is much more annoying to delve through but looks more modern. |
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| ▲ | collabs 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | In my experience it comes from the business and people who think if we need to touch the same code twice in the same month it is somehow a moral failing of some kind. |
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