Raceday.me 2.0 for iOS
Here it is: the all-new Raceday.me for iOS. Redesigned and rewritten from scratch. Now available on the App Store.
A little bit of background
The initial version of Raceday.me was released in 2019 and it was the first mobile app I ever made. It was written in Swift, which I had to learn and it was exclusively made for iOS. The positive feedback was very suprising and it didn't take long until the request for an android version started to come. I was very exhausted after the launch of this project and focused on smaller updates before I finally committed myself to the big android project.
When you write an iOS app in Swift, you have no chance to reuse the code for android. Both languages are completely different and you have to write everything from scratch to end up with two code bases you have to maintain. But there is one way around it, which motivated me to do this: React Native.
React Native
React Native is the little sister of React, a very popular UI framework for the web. A framework I know well and am pretty good at. Even though I haven't used React Native before, I was pretty sure this could be a great solution to write the android app and reuse the code for a future iOS version. Because the framework comes with one big selling point, it has an abstraction layer for the platform-specific code, which makes it possible to write one single app and distribute it to android and iOS with only a little bit of overhead.
And this is how I did the android app. I took all my learnings from Swift, rebuild it in React Native with an improved design, more pleasing user experience, and even better performance.
After the android version was out for a while, I started trying to compile the iOS app from the same code. It took me some time to get it to work, and I needed to adjust some parts of it, but as you are reading this the new iOS version is out and a big vision of having the same code for both platforms is finally there.
Support this project, if you like it
Please note that Raceday.me is a spare time project that still costs me more money than it generates revenue. If you like this project, please consider supporting it.
written on 10/7/2021 in raceday