turbo-ios VS react-native-screens

If you're a SwiftUI developer, I've had an issue open at https://github.com/hotwired/turbo-ios/issues/8 to get Turbo SwiftUI off the ground.

I've talked to a few folks about it and have heard responses ranging from "it's a bad idea/can't be done" (mainly because of SwiftUI bugs) to "why would you want to do that?". I think it would be amazing to have a declarative of building out a Hotwire Rails application inside of iOS. Bonus if the Turbo SwiftUI component could run on macOS.

For the mobile side, start with each platform's respective Turbo package: https://github.com/hotwired/turbo-ios and https://github.com/hotwired/turbo-android. Each has a demo app you can run in XCode/Android studio. To get a basic app building, follow each one's "Getting Started" guide. It's actually pretty easy to get a basic native app building, the hard part comes in integrating native components and services, as well as release management.

turbo-ios and turbo-android are the shell/wrapper apps handling native navigation, written for native iOS and Android. They are provided for you, and works out-of-the-box, but you risk having to fiddle with iOS and Android development for maintenance/debugging later on.

Ruby on Rails, Hotwire, Postgres, Redis

Does anyone have experience with https://github.com/hotwired/turbo-ios or https://github.com/hotwired/turbo-android ?

1. Turbo Native

I use Turbo Native on iOS to do exactly this.

You render your mobile web view like normal, wire up a JavaScript handler (formerly known as Turbolinks), and push native screens on iOS. It works really well for CRUD and "boring" SAAS apps with little interaction outside of forms. And when you need higher fidelity dropping down to SwiftUI or UIKit is straightforward.

https://github.com/hotwired/turbo-ios

To make things even simpler, I built Jumpstart iOS, which takes care of all of the Swift boilerplate. Navigation, authentication, and push notifications all work out of the box after adding a few endpoints to your server.

https://jumpstartrails.com/ios

Adding to the already mentioned solutions, another alternative may be to develop your app with Phoenix and [Hotwire](https://hotwired.dev/), using Turbo on the backend and [Turbo-ios](https://github.com/hotwired/turbo-ios) for your app.

turbo-ios and turbo-android are small wrappers around your web views. You write native Swift and Kotlin wrappers but the frameworks display your web content. They also handle navigation and data transmission between the views and native code.

I’d like to see this integrate more tightly with Rails Turbo framework. Ideally it would understand Visitables and plug into SwiftUI. I took a swing at that at https://github.com/hotwired/turbo-ios/issues/8 but have struggled to get it working … that and Strada hasn’t come out yet, which I assume is the equiv of the native plugins within Portals.

react-native-url-router (a single navigation system, using React Router + react-native-screens for stacks + react-native-pager-viewfor tabs).

Sure. Here is an example of what I'm talking about on github.

FATAL EXCEPTION: main Process: web.tradenewton.com, PID: 13063 java.lang.RuntimeException: Unable to start activity ComponentInfo{web.tradenewton.com/web.tradenewton.com.MainActivity}: androidx.fragment.app.Fragment$InstantiationException: Unable to instantiate fragment com.swmansion.rnscreens.ScreenStackFragment: calling Fragment constructor caused an exception at android.app.ActivityThread.performLaunchActivity(ActivityThread.java:3616) at android.app.ActivityThread.handleLaunchActivity(ActivityThread.java:3780) at android.app.servertransaction.LaunchActivityItem.execute(LaunchActivityItem.java:85) at android.app.servertransaction.TransactionExecutor.executeCallbacks(TransactionExecutor.java:135) at android.app.servertransaction.TransactionExecutor.execute(TransactionExecutor.java:95) at android.app.ActivityThread$H.handleMessage(ActivityThread.java:2251) at android.os.Handler.dispatchMessage(Handler.java:106) at android.os.Looper.loop(Looper.java:233) at android.app.ActivityThread.main(ActivityThread.java:8063) at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Native Method) at com.android.internal.os.RuntimeInit$MethodAndArgsCaller.run(RuntimeInit.java:631) at com.android.internal.os.ZygoteInit.main(ZygoteInit.java:978) Caused by: androidx.fragment.app.Fragment$InstantiationException: Unable to instantiate fragment com.swmansion.rnscreens.ScreenStackFragment: calling Fragment constructor caused an exception at androidx.fragment.app.Fragment.instantiate(Fragment.java:631) at androidx.fragment.app.FragmentContainer.instantiate(FragmentContainer.java:57) at androidx.fragment.app.FragmentManager$3.instantiate(FragmentManager.java:483) at androidx.fragment.app.FragmentStateManager.(FragmentStateManager.java:85) at androidx.fragment.app.FragmentManager.restoreSaveState(FragmentManager.java:2728) at androidx.fragment.app.FragmentController.restoreSaveState(FragmentController.java:198) at androidx.fragment.app.FragmentActivity$2.onContextAvailable(FragmentActivity.java:149) at androidx.activity.contextaware.ContextAwareHelper.dispatchOnContextAvailable(ContextAwareHelper.java:99) at androidx.activity.ComponentActivity.onCreate(ComponentActivity.java:297) at androidx.fragment.app.FragmentActivity.onCreate(FragmentActivity.java:273) at androidx.appcompat.app.AppCompatActivity.onCreate(AppCompatActivity.java:115) at com.facebook.react.ReactActivity.onCreate(ReactActivity.java:44) at android.app.Activity.performCreate(Activity.java:8006) at android.app.Activity.performCreate(Activity.java:7990) at android.app.Instrumentation.callActivityOnCreate(Instrumentation.java:1329) at android.app.ActivityThread.performLaunchActivity(ActivityThread.java:3589) ... 11 more Caused by: java.lang.reflect.InvocationTargetException at java.lang.reflect.Constructor.newInstance0(Native Method) at java.lang.reflect.Constructor.newInstance(Constructor.java:343) at androidx.fragment.app.Fragment.instantiate(Fragment.java:613) ... 26 more Caused by: java.lang.IllegalStateException: Screen fragments should never be restored. Follow instructions from https://github.com/software-mansion/react-native-screens/issues/17#issuecomment-424704067 to properly configure your main activity. at com.swmansion.rnscreens.ScreenFragment.(ScreenFragment.kt:41) at com.swmansion.rnscreens.ScreenStackFragment.(ScreenStackFragment.kt:30) ... 29 more

It´s very likely you are using react-native-screens and you forgot to updat the onCreate method. Just make sure you're onCreate method looks like this

Not yet, you can open an issue in react-native-screens repo and follow these issues: https://github.com/software-mansion/react-native-screens/issues/561 https://github.com/software-mansion/react-native-screens/issues/317

I LOVE the large title header behavior of the native-stack on iOS. I really wish the folks at RNav would implement something like that in a future release (I had rebuilt the large header from the ground up on our first app using Animated). As it stands, I am 90% sure I want to implement it on Words – but other features / fixes come first!