I think the best way (atm) to do mobile with meteor is to suck it up and go with RN, even though it’s not “ready”, and it’s certainly not “Meteor ready”. Probably in a few months, you’ll want to use RN, Apollo, and Meteor. Apollo (I think?) abstracts some of the more imperative, lower-level Redux code from you.
I’ve been writing two production apps in RN + Meteor for the past month and a half, and I’ve had to write a lot of my own code for stuff like ddp https://github.com/Streemo/react-ddp and connecting.
My conclusion is that it’s still less of a pain in the ass than Meteor + Cordova, and at the same time, I’m getting native-quality apps without having to do much work on the UI side of things.
RN’s navigator and animations are nearly impossible to implement via Cordova. Cordova is just not a viable option, imho. Your app won’t hit puberty, and it’ll forever be a prototype with Cordova. Go native with RN.
Phone Gap has established itself as the go-to option for fast multi platform development. The Adobe-owned open source framework is renowned for its stability and flexibility. It is a popular choice for web developers seeking to foray into app development because it uses familiar web development languages such as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. This is a time-saving advantage, because it means developers already experienced with these languages don’t have to spend additional time learning each mobile platform’s development language. Phone Gap also includes a wide selection of plugins that makes it an attractive option for developers seeking to create an app with multiple integration. It can also be used in collaboration with other application frameworks for more complex and customized builds.
Yeah, I keep asking myself if I should just suck it up and go for RN + Meteor.
I am currently trying to do something with F7 + Meteor + Cordova and not sure if the end result will be good…
From my experience, things like Ionic and F7 look great when you’re on their main website, playing around on the fake iPhone they display.
When you go and actually start to implement these things, it’s far different. It’s kind of like the McDonald’s burger you see on the billboard, versus the one you actually get at a dirty McDonald’s right off of the highway.
F7 looks great, but tbh, I wouldn’t bet any money on it. That said, I haven’t used it. Though, I have used Ionic and it’s totally a McDonald’s burger.
Edit: There’s so much that you get right out of the box from RN. Animations and performance being the most noticeable two. You can easily spend months trying to get native animations to perform well on a browser. It’s not worth it, imho.
I too bit the bullet and went ReactNative, and sofar, no regrets.
Data is served through GraphQL( Apollo-client and server ).
Meteor is used for user-authentication and for those things that need to be reactive. Using react-native-meteor
Meteor is also used for the web-version.
I could have used meteor as the data-layer( instead of Apollo), but I think making everything reactive puts an unnecessary load on the server. And I like to try shiny new tools
My Meteor Server + React Native app is in App Store and Google Play since Jun 2016. Much easier and faster to create than my previous meteor+cordova app. UI feels native, meaning wayyyyy faster than cordova. Thanks to https://github.com/inProgress-team/react-native-meteor to connect to Meteor backend.
So, basically you can have older or newer meteor web app and use the same server backend for react native. React Native is as easy as when I discover Meteor in 2012. Now I feels like Meteor is as complicated as Swift/Java which is good for high price and money making web/apps.
