Mobile Dev Weekly December 21, 2018   #237
We're closing out the year with a look back over the big stories, articles and tutorials of 2018. React Native, Progressive Web Apps and Google's Flutter seemed to dominate the chatter. We'll be back in the new year. Thanks for reading.
📲 The Mobile Dev Weekly Team
Android P Is Google’s Most Ambitious Update in Years — A look at this year's major Android update, and how it could help people use their phones less. proved popular with readers.
The Verge
Mobile Web Apps Finally Becoming An Alternative to Native Apps — This year many felt the tide turned for web apps: “web apps are finally becoming an alternative to native applications, and that’s something to be excited about”
Corbin Davenport
Sponsored
Easily Stream High Quality HLS Video Anywhere in the World — Use Cloudflare Stream to deliver an extraordinary video experience to your viewers worldwide, while reducing development time and costs.
Cloudflare Stream

Dark Patterns and Other Mobile Design No-Nos — The mobile web is a booming place right now, which means designers are spending lots of time trying to figure out how to win over mobile users. One way not to do that? Dark patterns.
Suzanne Scacca
Which JavaScript Frameworks Are the Fastest? — Web performance is a big and complex topic. This post narrows it down to a discussion of front end JavaScript frameworks and how using one versus another might impact the performance of your app. In particular, we’ll be looking at two things: (1) how long it
John Hannah
Vue Native: Build Native Mobile Apps with Vue.js — React has React Native, and now if you’re a Vue.js developer, you could give this a try. Unlike React Native this isn’t an official project from the same team and is essentially a Vue wrapper around React Native itself. Introductory article.
GeekyAnts
Sponsored
Low-Code Platforms: What Developers Think and Why — Is low-code the answer to your app delivery challenges? 5000+ devs speak out. See what they have to say in this whitepaper.
Progress Kinvey

Flutter
Using Google’s Flutter For Truly Cross-Platform Mobile Development — An intro to Flutter, comparing it to other mobile development platforms, and how to use it to get started building apps.
Mike Bluestein
Announcing Flutter Beta 1: Build Beautiful Native Apps — The first beta release of Flutter just got announced at Mobile World Congress 2018. It’s Google’s mobile UI framework for crafting native interfaces for both iOS and Android.
Google
Why I’m Giving Up Everything for Flutter “provides all of the features a mobile app developer needs, and seemingly none of the downsides”
Dean Chalk
Moving From React Native to Flutter — The latest in a line of stories about companies adopting other approaches after trying React Native. This time, an app with half a million users moves to Google’s Flutter.
Daniel Vestergaard (Reflectly)
How fast is Flutter? I built a stopwatch app to find out. — This weekend I had some time to play with the new Flutter UI framework by Google.
Andrea Bizzotto
PWAs
I Built A PWA and Published It In 3 App Stores, Here’s What I Learned — One developer’s story of his experiences in submitting to Google Play, the iOS App Store, and the Windows Store. It took ‘a month of work, a few hundred dollars, and lots of red tape.’
Judah Gabriel Himango
PWAs Are Coming to iOS 11.3: Cupertino, We Have A Problem — Multi-platform PWAs are now possible, but right now iOS support comes with some caveats..
Maximiliano Firtman
Progressive Web Apps on iOS Are Here — iOS 11.3 added support for several PWA technologies (such as Service Workers) meaning apps can now be installed on iOS without App Store approval. There are limitations, of course, and here’s a rundown of what you need to know.
Maximiliano Firtman
React Native
React Native Pros and Cons — This article takes a look at the advantages of React Native, why it’s so popular, and some potential drawbacks you might want to consider.
Jim Karg
Why Airbnb are 'Sunsetting' React Native — Airbnb explains how they were unable to overcome some technical and organizational challenges around React Native and are reinvesting in native development. React Native, itself, however continues to grow and propser.
Gabriel Peal (Airbnb Engineering)
Tab Bars are the New Hamburger Menus “a navigation pattern that got out of hand.”
Fabian Sebastian