Nostr Web Client

As a solo Nostr developer, it’s becoming hard for me to justify continuing to develop Comingle using native frameworks. I’m normally a proponent for native frameworks for the look and feel, but that can arguably scale well only with a team of developers, which I don’t have. I shipped the iOS app (backed by Nostr SDK for Apple Platforms) a couple months ago, but it’s very difficult for me to spend time to write a duplicate version in Android and Web, especially with the limited amount of time I have as is. Olas by nostr:npub1l2vyh47mk2p0qlsku7hg0vn29faehy9hy34ygaclpn66ukqp3afqutajft makes a compelling case for using React Native / NDK Mobile to ship fast — it’s slick and performs reasonably well in the brief time I’ve spent with it. I’m going to play around with NDK Mobile to see how far I can get with it.

Vitor Pamplona 1y ago

I don't think it makes any sense for single-dev teams to develop multiplatform Nostr Clients.

The Client needs to be EXTREMELY simple/small to allow the dev to spend time integrating and testing in all OSs.

Maintaining multiplatform apps (either native or via NDK) takes time because both OSs and their libraries will update separately, with stuff that will break your app all the time and you will keep running after those fixes. It's a massive time sink.

Most multiplatform apps end up becoming too shallow to be useful because the dev is spending too much time trying to make things work everywhere.

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Discussion

Michael J Burgess 1y ago

you is not wrong friend

Terry Yiu 1y ago

You’re not wrong. Depends on how much time the developer wants to spend to make it work, what their tolerance is for quality and testing thoroughly, etc. If using a multiplatform framework can get it 70% of the way there, some may be motivated to put in that extra 30% (I’m making numbers up). I don’t want it to be a single-dev effort forever, though. I do eventually want more developers working on it.

Vitor Pamplona 1y ago

Well it depends how much is there to "make things work". 70% of a kind 1 feed is a day-long project. 70% of multiplatform picture-in-picture background video playback controlled by AppleTV/Chromecast at the same time as the AppleWatch and GalaxyWatch with in-device controls to like, zap and report is a multi-month clusterfuck of work.

The key is the size of the app. To me Olas is already too big to be maintainable by a single dev in two platforms.

Terry Yiu 1y ago

That’s fair. Alternatives could be to:

1. Continue building native for one platform and focus on speed and quality. Make the product desirable enough that there will be demand for other platforms, and desire from other developers to contribute to (or hire developers to build on) those other platforms.

2. Same as 1 but use a multiplatform framework, which reduces the amount of code that needs to be rewritten.

Vitor Pamplona 1y ago

On 2, the true question is: can you make that product desirable enough faster than on 1? It's all about user adoption.

Sascha-Oliver Prolić 11mo ago

Hold my beer and watch

Vitor Pamplona 11mo ago

So many devs say that... :) I just drink their beer because they never come back to cash in.

Sascha-Oliver Prolić 11mo ago

I'll remind you