Exactly. Is it just a webpage served up with some native UI buttons to make it look more glossy? Are app permissions implemented as separate system users under POSIX? How many apps are written in languages/frameworks running from interpreters, and how many actually touch bare metal? Are app media that use Gallery permissions duplicating data or linking to it?
No one knows what an app is, the app development frameworks I learned 10 years ago are no longer relevant and have likely shifted to a whole new paradigm. If it looks perplexing to me, I can imagine it looks like magic to non-techies.
The PWA frameworks are pretty cool. Essentially just system level API hooks which then integrate into a existing React - NextJs - whatever projects. Granted it isn’t touching bare metal like you said but it is a nice level of a abstraction and beats dealing with android studio 🤢
Edit: I hear Expo is neat but I haven’t used it yet.
beats dealing with android studio
It’s been years since I went near Android for this reason, I’ve had some decent ideas for stuff I’d like to do on mobile but was so turned off on developing for the entire platform. Maybe I’ll have to take a look at some of the new frameworks.
My trouble is I would prefer to write in an embedded style C/C++ for the agricultural stuff I want to do, and all this Java/JS stuff and heavy focus on fancy UX is really not my vibe.
I’ve used expo, which is really just react native with some helpful tooling around it. It was my first real project with react as well, and all and all I’d recommend it.
React native is pretty great, but there’s a steep learning curve. Expo has some bugs, and once you get off the beaten path you might have some issues. You always have the option of ejecting to react native or native code, but the expo app is incredible - you can do live updates remotely, the app will just reload with the changes without rebuilding everything
I’ll probably use it for most apps moving forward