Yeah, I can't relate to that at all. My Matter devices are more reliable than what they replaced (mostly switches and dimmers so far), and HomeKit support has "just worked". Matter's a 16-month-old baby, though, so YMMV.
Home Assistant: The State of Matter (Jan, 2024)
"We believe in Matter: it’s open source, and most importantly, it’s fully local by default...
Matter launched only one year ago, compared to twenty years for a standard like Zigbee, so it’s important to account for that in your expectations."
Flowise https://flowiseai.com/ does something similar as well! I would check them out for sure if you're looking more on the OSS side.
We had the core node logic open source at one point, but closed it because we weren't seeing many contributions and it was less overhead once we started implementing things like node versioning, integrations, credentials, etc.
We still do deploy on-prem for enterprises that need it secure on their own cloud, and will link into open-sourcing a self-hosted version in the futur efor sure!
This is a very weird thing to say when expo is literally one line installation and it does not require you anything to be installed (even XCode) on machine for most projects. It is literally 10x times easier than just writing in Swift.
> It is literally 10x times easier than just writing in Swift.
I feel Swift as a language is a lot more productive than TS/JS personally. I've found things like React Native and Expo etc. more of a liability than a help for businesses that are heavily reliant on mobile.
If you don't need any native plugins other than those provided by Expo Go, then yes.
If you do need other libraries, or add native code yourself, the package system becomes a nightmare. It is NPM packages on top of Cocoapods on top of a XCode/Swift/Objective-C compile process. Only slightly better on Android.
Want to make a change to a library? Good luck getting linking working on your local setup.
Cordova had exactly the same issues. I'm not sure if Ionic Capacitor is better, but this is one area where Flutter is miles ahead.
in 2023 it is a one liner to add native modules, very easy to link via normal cocoapods or gradle, then almost zero configuration.
Flutter is a joke because it reimplements literally what apple intended to perfect - rendering pipeline, a lot of things impossible to make good without using native api.
When it works it's that simple. When it doesn't - perhaps because of some incompatibility between the native model and a recent Expo update, it's hours of debugging through the different layers to figure out what's going on. That's my experience starting a React Native project in 2023.
Flutter has issues with not using native UI, but I've found the package system with native modules to be way simpler and less issues. Unfortunately you're still stuck with Coacoapods though.
If you want to submit it to the app store you'll need to install XCode anyway to build it and submit it. Might as well just start there and have it configured right from the beginning.
No, you do not, you can use a free service by expo that would build in the cloud. Literally requires zero setup. Local build is needed only if you are sensitive to security, but many banks started to use it. Also native plugins became so easy to use it is a joke how simple it is comparing to cocoapods and some cryptic libraries.
Expo's workflow is so perfect comparing to pure native, it is not even comparable. To do iOS development you need: Swift Packages, Cocoapods and XCode at least. Whils in general it is simple, but cocoapods constantly fights with apple and xcode to not crash anything. While expo also uses cocoapods, it is much more stable because you can always just delete a native project and regenerate it from scratch and it will work.
I am not even starting to discuss how complicated is development for Android - literally everything now have 5+ different APIs for a simple things like "please encrypt this string" or "take a photo". React Native and Expo has perfect packages that solves real problems and work with a few keystrokes.
I'm glad it works for you. One thing I've learned from bitter experience is "don't swim upstream". Meaning, you're likely to have problems when you're using tech outside the way it was intended. Apple intends apps to be developed in Swift with XCode, so that's what they support and when they develop new features that's what they have in mind. They don't care about Expo and if they do something that breaks Expo or Flutter or any other third-party service, that's not their problem and they aren't going to do anything about it. Expo et al are always going to be second class citizens to Apple.
Cocoapods are on their way out. I use Swift Package Manager on new projects and it's literally a couple clicks to install whatever package you want. Haven't had any problems yet.
Because they run JS on main thread while react native tries to minimise it at all costs (only keeping rendering and animations, but not layouts for example).
