Just my two cents: I'm currently building an app on the Shoutem platform, and have been required to extend one of the Shoutem extensions to do so. I have been in direct communication with the Shoutem team throughout this proces, and have gotten to know the platform intimately.
A month into it, I can honestly say I can't recommend using the platform (yet). While the idea is an interesting one, it's bloated, buggy, slow, and doesn't offer much over optimizing a website for mobile devices. That said, the team behind the platform is great, and I'm confident they'll work out the kinks over the coming months to make it more user/developer friendly.
It’s weird that the app they decided to showcase [1] using their product - has one stars as majority of ratings with a main reason of it crashing all the time. If that’s the best what they could have shown, I wonder how bad it can get then
I've used Shoutem's standalone UI library[1] for my last project but haven't used their platform as a whole. During that time, I found it painful to get it working.
Their documentation[2] wasn't great. It was out of date (missing component attributes, icons etc.) and lacked good examples. Often I would have to dig into the source to figure out obscure errors. When I first starting using @shoutem/ui, I couldn't use the latest version of React Native because they locked themselves into an experimental feature[3] which even until now, seems like it hasn't properly resolved.
Again. I can't comment on their platform but I didn't have a good time using their UI library. Had I known this, I would have just gone with NativeBase[4].
Expo is used to run/preview a React Native app where Shoutem is both a CMS that you can use to manage your app's data and a UI library that you can use to build your app.
While I like react and react native, i still think requireing to run a JS interpreter in order to run a native "like" app is still not good engineering practice. I'm betting on multi-platform-projects (MPP) with Kotlin and Kotlin-Native. Engineering wise much more sound, however the iOS and Android platform should have some more support for Reactive like UI's. Without needing JavaScript.
Pardon my ignorance, but isn't Flutter a little immature too? I remember playing with it and Dart a while ago, still didn't seem to have everything necessary to ship something to production.
With that said, I think Dart isn't really a language popular enough to replace JS in big projects right now.
Looks very interesting, however you risk being rejected on the Apple app store because of this guideline:
“4.2.2 Other than catalogs, apps shouldn’t primarily be marketing materials, advertisements, web clippings, content aggregators, or a collection of links”.
Those are options with less functionality, it's not a tiered price, so you'll have to be sure your app will be a financial succes before you start developing.
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A month into it, I can honestly say I can't recommend using the platform (yet). While the idea is an interesting one, it's bloated, buggy, slow, and doesn't offer much over optimizing a website for mobile devices. That said, the team behind the platform is great, and I'm confident they'll work out the kinks over the coming months to make it more user/developer friendly.
But they said "Shoutem apps are slick and fast", how could this be???
[1] - https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/brides-wedding-genius-5-1/id...
https://github.com/shoutem/ui/issues/327https://github.com/shoutem/ui/issues/328
Their documentation[2] wasn't great. It was out of date (missing component attributes, icons etc.) and lacked good examples. Often I would have to dig into the source to figure out obscure errors. When I first starting using @shoutem/ui, I couldn't use the latest version of React Native because they locked themselves into an experimental feature[3] which even until now, seems like it hasn't properly resolved.
Again. I can't comment on their platform but I didn't have a good time using their UI library. Had I known this, I would have just gone with NativeBase[4].
[1] - https://github.com/shoutem/ui
[2] - https://shoutem.github.io/docs/ui-toolkit/components/typogra...
[3] - https://github.com/shoutem/ui/issues/241
[4] - https://nativebase.io/
Currently I'm using Expo, which is rather nice, but I have to detach rather often, because of stuff like PDF annotations or binary file storage.
How does Shoutem compare to Expo?
Dead Comment
With that said, I think Dart isn't really a language popular enough to replace JS in big projects right now.
“4.2.2 Other than catalogs, apps shouldn’t primarily be marketing materials, advertisements, web clippings, content aggregators, or a collection of links”.