Our Xamarin app is a bit sluggish and uses a lot more resources on your device than you might expect.
Especially on my slower phone, the Bitwarden UI feels like it would shortly freeze. And some actions take longer than expected.
The new native apps with a new UI look great and should be better to use.
Question. I am a computer dumb. Is this scary for me? Lol.
No, you should ignore these types of posts though.
No, this is mainly cosmetic changes and changes not visible to the user. It’s a result of a small team growing and thus having more time for making their apps better to use.
the apps will look a bit different but will be faster.
Much needed change.
Eh. Crossplatform isnt the problem here; Xamirin is. There’s a host of next gen cross platform frameworks like Flutter, React Native, Blazor that save you having to maintain two distinct apps; something that’s only going to add a bunch of developer burden
Agree. Will it be as performant as native? No. But will it be plenty performant for a password manager, yes.
The only thing I wish RN and Flutter would figure out is bloat. File sizes are huge compared to native. A shame there can’t be a shared model in mobile apps for the core system.
Flutter is native. It gets compiled to an executable, it just takes a render plane from the underlying OS and renders everything in it’s own engine. They’re working on a new render system that will make it go even faster.
React Native is just a fancy web browser wrapping with some helper APIs.
RN is native too I think, at least it advertises itself as a way to compile some kind of XML syntax into native widgets on either platform. An improvement to PWAs even if I despise typescript
yeah, it displays native widgets but there is still a js engine (browser) running in the background. So the basically made a layer between native components and Javascript. But the code which is running is js and js is slow.
yeah the JS/TS was always a killer for me ngl
React Native is just a fancy web browser wrapping with some helper APIs.
React native is not a browser. It uses native components.
I guess smaller apps would be nice but that’s also a thing that can be helped - I have a handful of flutter apps on my phone right now (that i know of) and they run in at:
18MB - Nextcloud recipes client
50MB - Spotube (Youtube music client with spotify integration)
100MB - My job - a savings and investments app, with half a dozen third party API integrations.
So depending on your scope and stuff you can really build an app to whatever size. Cant account for react native or blazor but the idea is usually just abstract native graphics APIs instead of using a browser runtime.
I didn’t even notice the app was sluggish, but this is still great news!
Man that looks sleek. I can’t wait for this update to roll out.
gosh, I wish Tuta were next.
If only.
their UI is the only thing that makes me consider switching to Proton Mail from time to time, but in the end it’s just too much hassle to do it all over again.
Your turn, 1Password. Native apps are just plain better.
1P has native apps.
Happy to hear!
Wait so what have we been using?
Edit: ah ok the post explained everything well
So you’re going to maintain two separate code bases with two separate teams as a knee jerk reaction to using one of the worst cross platform frameworks out there…
For an app that does little more than display encrypted text in a list…
weird flex but ok ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
This is great news! 👏
This is great news! I might switch back over from proton pass if the email Alias generation is also as good as Proton’s
Very exciting news… I’m the tech support for the family and I just can’t yet recommend argon as the hashing algorithm for everyone yet because they’ve said there’s a few potential hiccups. Looking forward to something snappier.
They are using mssql and xamarin. Very poor decisions
I chose Xamarin in the early days of Bitwarden because it was a technology that I was proficient at (.NET and C#) and it afforded me the time to maintain a mobile app along with all the other apps I was building for Bitwarden. Xamarin is a real time saver, for sure and it has served us well over the past 8 years, but it comes with some downsides as well: …
