Why we discontinued our Android / iOS SDK and Why JavaScript is the future of app development.
We have been noticing a steady decline in API calls from our Android and iOS SDK’s over the past year. 32% of our requests used to be from Android and iOS SDK (23% Android and 9% iOS) a year ago. Today, less than 6% of requests are from native apps built with Java and Swift combined.
When we noticed a steady decline over a year, we did talk to few of our customers who were heavily using our Android and Swift SDK’s in the past and have migrated away from it now. Most of them switched to frameworks like Ionic and React Native which helps their teams build native apps (in case of React Native) or hybrid apps (in case of Ionic) with just one language — JavaScript. Frameworks like these save teams and companies hundreds of thousands of dollars every year by not having a separate teams for building the same app on each of these platforms. You can build apps with JavaScript and run them on any platform (Android, iOS or Windows) you like. This means managing a single codebase for all the bugs, feature-requests, faster time to market to your customers and you move a lot faster than your competition.
Technology companies like Microsoft, Google, Facebook and more build complex applications with JavaScript that runs across Web, Desktop, Mobile and Embedded / IoT, all with just one language — JavaScript. Since the launch of Node.js in 2009, JavaScript has also become one of the most popular languages for building server-side software. Today, it’s now making its way into applications for desktop with Electron, for embedded / IoT with Cylon and for mobile with Ionic and React Native.
We honestly think JavaScript will take over the world of app development — be it web, mobile, or desktop with one codebase being able to run on all the platforms. HTML & CSS will be the de-facto language of choice for UI development. With Progressive Web Apps coming into play, its easier to see web apps looking closer and closer to their native apps counterparts and with the launch of WebAssembly — performance will increase many fold making it just as great native app ever was. JavaScript is also being updated with new language improvements like async / await and more which makes it look more like a full-fledged programming language with everything you need.
Our JavaScript SDK works flawlessly on the server with NodeJS, on mobile with Ionic and React Native, on the web with React & Angular (and even plain old JavaScript), on desktop with Electron and more. In fact, we automatically handle platform specific code and give you one consistent API that works across devices. We do recommend you to have a look here for our JavaScript documentation.
If you want to use our Java / Swift SDK — you still can. Its completely open source and on GitHub and you can find them here. The only difference is, its now community supported and we rely on the community to maintain it and answer StackOverflow questions. We still do review code and accept PR’s — so if you’re looking for your favourite feature that needs to be implemented in any of these SDK’s— go ahead and send us the PR. :)
We know this was a tough decision to make. We’re now at a tipping point where investing in Android and iOS SDK’s makes very little sense heading forward. We do recommend teams thinking of working on iOS and Android to consider and review React Native / Ionic before making a decision. If you want to port your app from Android / iOS to JavaScript, we have teams that can help you do just that. Check us out here. If you need any help, please don’t hesitate to talk to us on our Slack group.
