In 2017 I gave a talk at Chain React about building great user experiences with React Native. At the time the tech was new and the quality of the mobile apps built with React Native was poor. The gist of my talk was that it’s possible to build great apps with React Native, one just needs to care enough.
My message didn’t resonate as well as I’d hoped. It’s hard to make people care about quality when the measuring stick of the technology is “look how fast I made this cross-platform app”. In contrast, inside the early iOS dev community, caring for quality was something that everyone shared.
The modern generation of users grew up without knowing what it feels like to use an offline, low-latency, well-crafted apps and websites. There’s little incentive now to spend any resources on improving quality, while your competition spends it on more features and ads.
I love my AI tools. They cured me from the blank page curse, they help me learn new tech much faster, and produce boring boilerplate code.
But they also make it easier than ever to not care about quality…