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Discussion on: You Probably Don't Need A Front End Framework

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J.C.Ködel

A point that many does not take into account: old devices. I live in a 3rd world country where internet is a luxury (so is decent mobile devices). I made an HTML app with Ionic and most of my users could not use it (I have 1.4 million downloads, so, "most of my users" is a lot of users). Reason: Android WebView in ancient versions (Lollipop come with Chrome 37). Most of those frameworks start rendering something with Chrome 55 (Ionic is using all cutting edge techs, as CSS variables, ES6, etc., so, Chrome 64-ish is the minimum).

That said, one part of my app works fine (even in oldest Android 4.4 with Android WebView): the Flarum forum. They do not use any fancy frontend frameworks and Mithril (a view framework, as React or Vue).

So: if you want to be successfull for people who are not techies (as they will not update their phones - they don't even know that option exists sometimes), or if you pretend to be a hit on BRICS or poor contries, don't use fancy front-end frameworks ;-)