Another update over here 
[I got some messages that people were interested in our path, so I thought I would update on what we have been doing and our experiences as it could help many on this forum]
Users and Localization
Yay! Deployed to tens of thousands of users already, US, France (rest of continent to follow) and Middle East – in partnership with leading hardware makers. Which raises the issue of interface languages. We added French in under two days to a reasonably complex app thanks to tap-i18n. Next is Spanish.
Mobile Apps
We did it! Wasn’t easy, but we got Android and iOS apps pushed into the app stores. I have to say we were super impressed with the integration of Cordova. There are always kinks, but it’s so much faster and easier than playing with Cordova yourself. We used Crosswalk for Android and (for technical reasons) had to stick to UIWebview for iOS (vs. WKWebview).
A major challenge was learning to use XCode (on iOS, you have to compile the package generated by Meteor, on Android, you get APK’s out of the box). And you do need devices handy for Android as the simulator (well, to put it mildly) sucks big time!
Debugging
This cannot be under-estimated. Thanks to the ability of watching / affect the console and the sources from the mobile app on your desktop, we were able to debug issues very quickly. We noticed that Safari iOS doesn’t behave 100% as Chrome and had to make some minor adjustments to our CSS and sometimes to event handlers. We would have never caught this if we couldn’t add breakpoints into the JS code live and step through it. On iOS, you can even add breakpoints in XCode in your plugins (on Android, you can’t do that, so have to keep watching the logs – adb logcat).
Push Notification
I wholeheartedly recommend @raix’s raix:push, as it works really well and in under a day, you have notifications and badges in your Apps!
What about React-Native vs Cordova
Our App needs Webviews, so using Cordova is by far the fasted path. [Also,we use Blaze as we like HTML-based templates more than JSX]. What is nice about the Cordova approach is that your code is 99.99% portable on mobile (aside from some potential kinks in how Safari iOS which are easy to debug, but you may not experience them). It seems if you take the React route, you do have to re-code parts of the interface into React-Native, but not for us, real re-use
Back-end
We talk in our previous post about a PHP back-end … that’s gone. It’s all Meteor now! We even generate PDF’s on the server, upload files to S3, generate thumbnails of images on the fly (with Node package Sharp).
We ditched …
No more @aldeed’s autoforms – package no longer maintained anyway, might as well code what you need yourself. Semantic-UI has built-in form validation which is very powerful. But was great to start so we can focus on functionality.
Next Steps
- As our user base grows, we need to start planning for failure of horizontal scaling with Mongo oplog, we have some ideas
- Apollo?
- Migration to VueJS or using VueJS wrapper?