Skip to content
TopicTracker
From HackerNewsView original
TranslationTranslation

Using Go for Mobile Apps: A retrospective on a year of development with Gomobile

After a year of using Gomobile to develop a mobile app in Go, the author reflects on the experience, covering the development process, challenges faced with the Gomobile toolchain, and the overall viability of using Go for cross-platform mobile development.

Background

- **Go (Golang)**: Google's programming language (2009), loved for backends but rarely used for mobile apps. - **Gomobile**: An official but experimental Google toolset that lets Go code run on Android and iOS, either as a library called from native apps or as a full app. - **Why it matters**: If gomobile worked well, teams could share business logic between server and mobile without switching languages. But it faces big hurdles: weak UI support, tricky platform integration, and a small community. - **Prior context**: Cross-platform mobile is crowded — Flutter, React Native, Kotlin Multiplatform are the big players. Gomobile never took off. This article shares a real developer's experience after one year of using it in production.

Related stories