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Over the air updates is SO valuable with react-native. Being able to ship hotfixes instantly to our users has saved our asses multiple times.
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I’ve worked with both native and cross-platform. I think the mentality of being able to make changes quickly without much review often comes from cross-platform, especially when the developers come from a web background.

Changes are cheap and fast, so teams often feel less pressure to test everything thoroughly before a release. Which is a fair tradeoff. That’s part of the reason we can have dozens of releases a day on the web. Not just because we can, but because sometimes we have to.

With native, you know each release is harder to roll back, so you tend to build more tooling around releases, think through changes more carefully, and test more thoroughly before they’re ready to ship. You opt for one bigger, more stable release every few weeks instead.

At the end of the day, both approaches work.

Heh, now that I think about it, maybe web and cross-platform devs were the original vibe coders? Changes are cheap and fast. Just move fast and break stuff.

Native devs are the old-school ones. Shipping is expensive, so you better get it as right as possible.

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> "Native devs are the old-school ones. Shipping is expensive, so you better get it as right as possible."

Exactly this. After close to two decades building for the platform, the mindset is really to be cautious and make sure everything is rock solid before shipping.

This has more to do with building up a quality tool chain and testing process than being slow.

But sometimes there is a need to ship over the air updates, and for that (on Kotlin) there is Zipline [0] from Cashapp. I haven't used it in anger yet, but I know some people who do and trust it.

[0]: https://github.com/cashapp/zipline

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Totally depends on your business model too. We have clients that often require quick changes for compliance reasons, and they need to ensure all users of our apps are congruently updated. That’s not easy without OTA.
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This is so true, and I'm surprised that Shopify didn't mention it or that they don't use OTA updates.
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Are you saying a native app can't make an http request and update the code they JIT?
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It can download Javascript (or other interpreted language, or config data), but you generally can't download and execute new compiled native code on iOS, due to iOS code-signing/executable-memory restrictions.

Also keep in mind Apple might penalize you for dodging the review process and shipping new features, etc.

(btw, one exception to the JIT rule is custom browsers for the EU)

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Pardon my ignorance but can't an iOS app host a WASM runtime without being a browser? And if so it doesn't need to be an interpreted language necessarily.
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I am fairly certain this is against Apple's policies. In principle you're not supposed to change the functionality of your app without review.
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i don't see any difference between wasm and js? If react native apps can be updated with js, wasm should be allowed.
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I think updating js without review is also against policy.
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It's a grey area.

App Review Guidelines §2.5.2 says: "Apps should be self-contained in their bundles, and may not read or write data outside the designated container area, nor may they download, install, or execute code which introduces or changes features or functionality of the app, including other apps"

Technically Apple can punish you for anything but so far it seems to be accepted for small fixes and tweaks.

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Yes, it could, but then you would have re-invented React Native. But in WASM.
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Yeah, but to my understanding that’s not what Shopify is doing.
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Precisely. That has always been prohibited both by technical measures and by the App Store review guidelines. Especially on Apple, but also on Google Play / Android as well.
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Doing so would require the app to have the business logic written in JavaScript. Apple only allows JIT’ing JavaScript using JSC.
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This seems to be a weaker claim than "RN is needed to do this", but practically speaking it might amount to that.
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Sure you can choose not to adopt React’s reactive paradigm and manage state directly but using JavaScript. My understanding was that in RN, JavaScript code manipulates C++ objects in the C++ part of RN, which then calls host platform code to create views and render.
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