Problem:
Find a software framework for a small social app startup with little in house technical expertise to create a relatively simple app for Android and IOS fast, with little cost but scalability.
Solution:
Use Vue-Native, Google Firestore and Google Cloud Functions.
Solution Explanation:
The biggest/cheapest group of developers is assumed to be web developers. They are assumed to know HTML, CSS and Javascript. Therefore a Javascript based crossplatform solution such as Nativescript is the easiest to find cheap developers for and only maintaining one codebase with one tech stack instead of two.
Nativescript offers native access to native APIs such as maps or camera functions and is faster than Apache Cordova based frameworks.
Vue is a popular front end framework for webdesign, that offers easy scalability and code reuse opportunities to reduce the amount of code to maintain even further.
Vue and Nativescript are integrated as Vue-Native, which offers easy access to all the capabilities and lots of tutorials, so it is easy for web developers to learn the framework and join the team.
Google Firestore is a SaaS solution for cloud databases that offers real time speed (eg. for messaging) and pay per use (low cost and scalable) and does not require a lot of database knowledge to set up and maintain. Further it is well integrated with google cloud functions, which we use for small functions that we do not want to run on the user device while also being low cost.