Over the past few months I have been building an app for a friend called Dark Legacy Comics in my spare time. I previously wrote about the iOS version I released, and now I’m very happy to say that I’ve launched the Android version!
You can get the app from https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.chofter.dlc, using any Android device.
As with the iOS version, the app costs $2, and all proceeds go the author of the comic to help with funding his site costs. Given the comic gets about 200k visitors per month, it’s quite expensive!
On a technical level this is very cool, as I got to reuse about 98% of all the code from the iOS version due to building it with React Native from Facebook. This allowed me to write the app in JavaScript, but it runs using fast native code on both iOS and Android. The process wasn’t exactly smooth, as there are still a lot of differences between the platforms that have not been papered over by the framework (some of which I describe here), but in general it’s far, far more efficient than learning both Objective-C and Android development. So, thanks to my colleagues at Facebook for building such great tools!
