• Chewy@discuss.tchncs.de
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    8 months ago

    Our Xamarin app is a bit sluggish and uses a lot more resources on your device than you might expect.

    Especially on my slower phone, the Bitwarden UI feels like it would shortly freeze. And some actions take longer than expected.

    The new native apps with a new UI look great and should be better to use.

    • linearchaos@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      Yeah I mean we use the app for like 3 seconds here and 3 seconds there. I’m not saying that if it was twice as fast it wouldn’t make a meaningful impact but I still might not notice.

  • merthyr1831@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    Eh. Crossplatform isnt the problem here; Xamirin is. There’s a host of next gen cross platform frameworks like Flutter, React Native, Blazor that save you having to maintain two distinct apps; something that’s only going to add a bunch of developer burden

    • moritz@l.deltaa.xyz
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      8 months ago

      I always recognize Flutter apps on Android as being non-native and avoid them because of this.

      I think it is because they seem to never use the system font but Quicksand instead and all the animations feel slightly off.

      • merthyr1831@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        Personally, beyond a few material-like components I always prefer it when an app goes for its own system-agnostic design language like Spotify does. On desktop I’m definitely more picky if I can get away with it; Qt dor KDE and GTK for GNOME etc

        • deadcream@sopuli.xyz
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          8 months ago

          I have given up on the fight a long time ago. On the desktop the only line I draw is that the app must respect system font configuration and use system-provided file dialogs.

      • deadcream@sopuli.xyz
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        8 months ago

        Same with Compose even though it’s ironically considered native in the Android dev community.

        The easiest way to tell that the app is not native is tooltips (those that appear when you long press on a button in a toolbar). For some reason UI frameworks just can’t agree to display them in the same way, even if they use material design. Compose’s ones are especially bad (some apps like Play store actually have different kinds of tooltips on different screens, meaning they use multiple UI frameworks in the same app).

          • deadcream@sopuli.xyz
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            8 months ago

            It looks mostly the same as XML views but some components look and behave wildly different for no apparent reason (tooltips are one of those).

    • fmstrat@lemmy.nowsci.com
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      8 months ago

      Agree. Will it be as performant as native? No. But will it be plenty performant for a password manager, yes.

      The only thing I wish RN and Flutter would figure out is bloat. File sizes are huge compared to native. A shame there can’t be a shared model in mobile apps for the core system.

      • AMDIsOurLord@lemmy.ml
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        8 months ago

        Flutter is native. It gets compiled to an executable, it just takes a render plane from the underlying OS and renders everything in it’s own engine. They’re working on a new render system that will make it go even faster.

        React Native is just a fancy web browser wrapping with some helper APIs.

        • aeharding@lemmy.world
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          8 months ago

          React Native is just a fancy web browser wrapping with some helper APIs.

          React native is not a browser. It uses native components.

        • merthyr1831@lemmy.world
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          8 months ago

          RN is native too I think, at least it advertises itself as a way to compile some kind of XML syntax into native widgets on either platform. An improvement to PWAs even if I despise typescript

          • hruzgar@feddit.de
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            8 months ago

            yeah, it displays native widgets but there is still a js engine (browser) running in the background. So the basically made a layer between native components and Javascript. But the code which is running is js and js is slow.

            • deadcream@sopuli.xyz
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              8 months ago

              JS by itself is very fast (it’s one of the fastest dynamic languages). It’s interop with platforms APIs that is slow, at the fact that each React app spins up its own instance of Chromium also doesn’t help.

      • merthyr1831@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        I guess smaller apps would be nice but that’s also a thing that can be helped - I have a handful of flutter apps on my phone right now (that i know of) and they run in at:

        18MB - Nextcloud recipes client

        50MB - Spotube (Youtube music client with spotify integration)

        100MB - My job - a savings and investments app, with half a dozen third party API integrations.

        So depending on your scope and stuff you can really build an app to whatever size. Cant account for react native or blazor but the idea is usually just abstract native graphics APIs instead of using a browser runtime.

  • Nix@merv.news
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    8 months ago

    This is great news! I might switch back over from proton pass if the email Alias generation is also as good as Proton’s

  • subtext@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    Very exciting news… I’m the tech support for the family and I just can’t yet recommend argon as the hashing algorithm for everyone yet because they’ve said there’s a few potential hiccups. Looking forward to something snappier.

    • glibg10b@lemmy.ml
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      8 months ago

      I chose Xamarin in the early days of Bitwarden because it was a technology that I was proficient at (.NET and C#) and it afforded me the time to maintain a mobile app along with all the other apps I was building for Bitwarden. Xamarin is a real time saver, for sure and it has served us well over the past 8 years, but it comes with some downsides as well: …

  • aeharding@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    So you’re going to maintain two separate code bases with two separate teams as a knee jerk reaction to using one of the worst cross platform frameworks out there…

    For an app that does little more than display encrypted text in a list…

    weird flex but ok ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

    • NeatNit@discuss.tchncs.de
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      8 months ago

      I don’t get what you’re saying. It’s not a knee-jerk reaction for one thing, it’s a thought-out conclusion. They already maintain multiple codebases (server, browser extensions, mobile client…), they’re big enough that it’s not a bad idea, aren’t they? And it does do more than display encrypted text, notably implementing auto-fill and eventually passkeys.

      I also don’t see this as a ‘flex’ in any way, just transparency and sharing their process and conclusions with the community.

    • theherk@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      Recognizing you as a PWA developer; and a damn fine one, I get your take. But surely you are aware there are limitations to using PWA’s or other cross platform libraries. Sometimes maintaining multiple UI’s is the right choice. Especially if very little of your code is actually the front end. For you, Voyager is pretty much 100% front end, so that’s 100% of your code. But for Bitwarden, the interface is a much smaller proportion.

      • aeharding@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        But for Bitwarden, the interface is a much smaller proportion.

        Can you elaborate on that? Bitwarden’s apps use Bitwarden public API, similar to how the Voyager app uses Lemmy’s public API.

        • theherk@lemmy.world
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          8 months ago

          Sure. Bitwarden provides its own backend. So that backend represents some portion of their code base. In the case of Voyager, Lemmy provides the backend. So that backend isn’t a portion of your code. So Voyager is 100% frontend. Bitwarden is < 100% frontend.

          • aeharding@lemmy.world
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            8 months ago

            I don’t really see how developing a backend or not has anything to do with the decision to build a native or cross platform app.

            • theherk@lemmy.world
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              8 months ago

              Because it changes the risk benefit profile of the choice. Imagine that your backend is 70k hours of work and your interface is 1k hours. Managing two interfaces isn’t going to seem like nearly as big an ask so other variables may get a higher weight. Of course those numbers are contrived for the sake of explanation, but if you still don’t think there are any circumstances in which others may value the benefits of native applications over cross platform applications, that’s fine. My point is simply that it may not seem like the trouble of managing two frontends is as insurmountable as you may think.

              But I have a hard time believing you don’t think it is possible that there are any situations where one might reasonably believe it worth it.

              • aeharding@lemmy.world
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                8 months ago

                There are absolutely reasons where a native app is worth it - I just don’t think building your own backend or not factors into that decision much.

                Maybe the point you are trying to make, is when you have enough resources/large enough company, having duplicate teams for each native app isn’t that big of a deal? I agree financially, although is is harder to technically coordinate two teams with dual releases and implementing features twice, with twice the bugs, and it slows things down. (Maybe not a big deal to Bitwarden - their app featureset may be quite stable, IDK)

                (Disclaimer - I’ve been on teams building kotlin/swift apps and also cross platform apps professionally, so this is my firsthand anecdotal experience.)

                • theherk@lemmy.world
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                  8 months ago

                  I don’t disagree. I’m just saying the distribution of workload has an impact on what looks a good idea or too hard.