It’s doable, sure, with Tauri or with Capacitor, etc. But could it have a delightful user experience without access to the native UI?
Elm is such a great language for the developer experience but while thinking about a language to use for my next mobile App, I fell like Elm would be great (even delightful!) for me. But the end user might have a different experience, by the constraints of any web view based App.
I wish I was wrong. And might give it a shot anyway. But what do you think? Is there any App released and created with Elm that you enjoy using it?
I don’t know if you are right or wrong, and also I suppose it depends a lot on what your application is doing. Sometimes there is no alternative to features that need native platform access.
However, I’m trying to make a push to improve the situation for PWAs at least (more info soon I hope). Others have pushed Elm + Tauri too. And in the age of LLMs, I think if your styling and design is a well separated concern, I imagine it not too expensive to maintain a couple of UIs that have some native feel, depending on the detected platform.
Hopefully, this can cover the most common use cases for conventional apps.
We are building an Elm + Tauri app right now (https://last-transfer.com) soon to go into private beta. I’ve had good comments from our testers that it looks good and feels fine to use. We are not paying a lot of attention to making sure it feels native vs being clear and easy to work with.
Perhaps users now days are so engaged in with applications that deliver both web and mobile apps via Tauri, Electron, etc., and therefore have the same feel between both, that I wonder if the push for the mobile app to feel native is less of an issue? Perhaps the web has become its own “native” feel and users don’t delineate in the long run?
Awesome! Would love to know more about it. Some screen shots would be really cool too, if possible. Maybe could use it as some inspiration
Yeah, I think people are getting more and more used to this approach. I guess I’m one of the few that really still enjoy seeing a native/simple UI.
Every time I cannot swipe back on my iPhone, I fell like having a terrible experience…
I helped the development of a very popular App (here in Brazil) with Flutter and even there still fell like not having the best UX. More than 70 million users and bad UX is not really a complain. But still fell like it’s an alien App on my iPhone.
If possible, could you share what was the teams’s choice for css? Are you using pure css, elm-css, elm-ui, …?
I just upgraded the dependencies of one of my personal projects that was built in Flutter (and firebase firestore) and it was such a painful experience that using elm for mobile became even more attractive
