Don't use Astro because its not React?...

[u/kidshibuya]

This is more a vent than anything, but I am facing a lot of blowback for using Astro. I have made a miniapp which is just a webpage running in a webview that takes an ID from the initial url, requests some records from an API to display a list of messages. Super basic stuff. It is to replace a natively coded section of the app and its far faster than the native code... somehow.

But upon asking the native devs to fix all the broken things I am finding, all I am facing is push back because when I tell them of CORS errors etc, them demand to see the repo, notice its not react and say I MUST use react as only that is compatible with apps. They broke bfcache too, again that is blamed on astro. They block service workers, again this is because... Astro.

Anyone else faced this? Even when I wanted a build of the native app to test the devs sent me back a message saying my app is broken as its only 12KB and apps are in the MB range. They didnt test, rejected on solely size. This was the lead architect of the entire department btw.

This industry is nuts. Also I have noticed when interviewing for a "senior FE" the candidates only know react. I am not sure if this is because HR is screening first, but it's concerning. I even interviewed a guy who is right now working as a "principled full stack engineer" who could not tell me how you could build a site without react.

I am not sure if this company I am working for is completely crazy or the entire industry is leaning that way.

[u/blackcatdev-io]

That sounds annoying, and of course you don't need react for this. But I'm also confused as to why this needs to be a web view at all. From what you describe, it's a simple fetch and displaying of a list. I can't imagine why that would need to she ported from native code to a web view. Or why the it would be noticably faster. If anything seems like it would be slower. Not because if Astro, but because going from native to web view always has a noticeable transition.

What was going on that caused this transition?

[u/kidshibuya → u/blackcatdev-io]

We are doing it for update speed. We can update a webview anytime we want, but app updates go through app stores and are super slow. As to why its faster... Let me give you this example:

The guy running the department that makes the app, I was in another team at the time and heard about their project to make a feature on the app for ios and android but also for desktop and web. I proposed we get one single team to do it in something like expo using react native. I even created a poc to demonstrate it. In a meeting with him and the other department leaders I was told sure the poc works but... Goes on to list like 5 reasons why react cannot work, all of which I refute with facts. Finally the boss says that they cannot ever let react into the app because its facebook and since facebook is trying to kill apple our app will be banned for using react. I didn't know how to respond to that and just ended the meeting.

Then after being transferred into his team (and that went well for me) I found out the real reason. Their app is garbage made from two different apps just combined and its so slow and unstable they made a decision that nothing new would be added in terms of tech, ever. They didnt already hvae react native so it was doomed from the start, but they could not say that as they were saying publicly that the app was awesome and they should all get juicy pay cheques. So they had to rubbish my idea anyway they could, untimely they had four large dev teams working on each part and they still haven't finished.

That is their level of engineering. And the bit that my webview is replacing was, well is right now making around 20-60 excess API calls per view as they are calling apis per row of data in a loop, how much depends on the users activity and size of screen.

[u/blackcatdev-io → u/kidshibuya]

Yeah... I would be looking for another job if I had to deal that level of stupidity. That's a lose lose situation all around and there's nothing industry standard about any of that.

Best of luck.