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Hey Charlie
What's the future of mobile app development? What are some important patterns that you see and what's your prediction?
I think that over the next few years, almost everyone making mobile apps will be using something like React Native/Exponent.
It's too much trouble to worry about iOS and Android separately. It takes more time and money. So I think we'll see most people who are Swift developers or Android Java developers move over, slowly. And most people who are new to mobile will just start with React Native/Exponent (or something else like it that might come along).
There is some chance that the mobile web gets good enough that that becomes a viable alternative--every time phones get faster, this gets more and more reasonable. But I think using the mobile web for apps is still pretty far away from feeling really good and not moving that fast towards getting there, even though Ionic is a good effort and people at Google and elsewhere have been doing a lot of good work to improve PWAs. The last really lauded web app I saw was Lyft's PWA, which I think falls into this valley of "I'm really impressed; I don't think I could build something that good and slick" but at the same time noticeably not as good as the native mobile apps Lyft already has. Web technologies evolve pretty slowly--for good reasons!--and so I don't expect this to be awesome soon.
I also think the building blocks of mobile aren't all supported really well by the web. If you look at the newer apps that are super popular--Snapchat and Instagram--they are very image and video focused. The building blocks of mobile web and even React Native aren't good enough to do the things you want to do with photos and videos yet, and they'll need to be in order to let people build the things people want to do on their phones in the future.
For games--at least games like the current set of games that fill the app stores--people will probably continue to use Unity for most things which seems to work well and most people seem to like.
There are some pretty gnarly problems with distribution, etc., but there are some interesting things on the horizon to address that, like Facebook Messenger Instant Games. I don't know how that will play out.