I’m a laid-off engineer / manager with an idea for an app that I think could actually make it in the market. My biggest problem is that I was a backend & data engineer and know that aspect really well, but almost nothing about mobile/ front end. None of my coding friends did mobile development either - full stack web apps is as close as we get. What’s the best way to set up a dev environment for mobile development? Tc: $0 Yoe: 20 #startup #mobile #entrepreneur
What's the idea? React native/ flutter / Ionic etc are not hard to learn.
Not giving away the idea to a bunch of devs :) Not too heavy on the UI, maybe 5-6 screens with user interaction. much heavier on the data side which I already know really well.
20 yoe and you're asking us how to setup a basic dev env?
What’s it like to struggle while I get paid to hangout at the beach all day.
Mobile guy here: Mobile is pretty hard now. Both of the major platforms have gone through a lot of iterations. There’s tons of abstraction now and in a large “real” codebase at a large company you’ll be dealing with a lot of paradigms. Back in the olden days, on Android for example, you just had to know Java and learn the 4 main app components (activity, service, provider, receiver). You made stuff with LinearLayouts and RelativeLayouts and it was all pretty straightforward. Then they added Kotlin. Then they moved to MVVM. They deprecated background execution + alarm manager. They added constraintlayout. Then they added Compose recently. So in an app that’s survived all those paradigms you’ll be dealing with a lot of concepts. For iOS I’d just start with Scrumdinger. It gives you everything that you need to build a real app. Stick with Swift and SwiftUI and you’ll be fine. For Android, just learn Compose I guess. It abstracts a lot. It’s probably good to understand what’s going on under the hood but if you’re doing SwiftUI on the iOS side it’s the clearest analog. I just don’t love some of the shorthand top level functions that are critical for building a working app (rememberSavable is bizarre if you haven’t built a “vanilla” Android app and managed your own state restoration with onSaveInstanceState). Good luck
I'm not sure about iOS development but native Android development is easy to do except for the bluetooth part 😭😭. Also, if you want to build a cross multi platform application then you can go with React Native. If you (OP) need any help with the Android development part, I am here for you. 😊
I think flutter is more reasonable for cross platform tbh. RN has always had shit tier support for android and android RN generally a year or two behind the iOS impl
If want multi platform and don’t wanna learn too much, expo + react native is the way
Just use ChatGPT or Claude to ask these questions. Which ever you choose will also wrote the code for you.