Ep. #128, Cross-Platform App Development with Simon Grimm

Brian Douglas: Welcome to another installment of Jamstack Radio. On the line we've got Simon Grimm. Simon, welcome.

Simon Grimm: Thanks for having me, and I'm glad to be here.

Brian: Yeah, pleasure. You're our second guest back to back, from Germany too, as well. I just realized that when you said that earlier. But yeah, recently just had the creator of Superstarter on talking about his project.

Simon: Yeah, it's funny. You have talked more to him than I, but I think I just live a few kilometers from him so I still need to reach out. So Johannes, if you're listening, I'm going to get in contact soon.

Brian: Amazing. Yeah, so Simon, do you want to tell the listeners who you are and what you do?

Simon: Sure, sure. I've been a web and mobile developer for the past eight years and I started becoming a blogger in 2014. I settled on a framework back then, I wrote about it, and I quickly became the known person and expert in that space for a framework called Ionic, which we're definitely going to talk more about later. Yeah, over the last seven or eight years this has grown into my own little business.

For the last six years I'm self employed, I run the Ionic Academy which is an online school focused on Ionic. Every month I release new courses and tutorials around Ionic and, yes, you can believe this that there's always something new because versions keep changing in the web development world. There's always something to update or new to talk about.

Since start of this year, I also run a second platform called Galaxies.dev where my focus is on everything beyond Ionic and especially React Native. Simply because I just love all the cross platform development aspects. I tried doing Native development, but I'm so much into all the cross platform stuff and the intersection of web and mobile, and how web developers can build mobile apps and what you need to watch out for in mobile that it totally makes sense.

Next to that I run a YouTube channel, I crossed 50,000 subscribers this year and I also do podcasting with my cohost, All The Code Podcast. We talk about all the code on there, surprise, surprise.

Brian: Perfect. I've not seen your content. Until you reached out, I was not aware of you. But this is reminiscent to when I talked to Scot Tilensky a couple years ago, it was around the time that Syntax FM had just started and he gave us the behind the scenes of how we start on YouTube, how he created the Level Up Tuts courses. Now they just recently were acquired into Sentry as well, which is pretty cool for them. But I'm curious in your trajectory and background, what made you want to make the jump from... You're still a developer, but to educator?

Simon: Yeah, so first of all, honestly I just got goosebumps when you said it sounds like Scot Tilensky because the whole time, the last one, two, three years, you try to look up mentors and I tried to look at what Scot's doing and I think he's doing a great job. So yeah, I just got goosebumps when you said that. I started out of university, actually as a Native mobile developer at a company which was kind of fun.

But on my commute I always listened to The Smart Passive Income podcast and that stuff, and somehow that got me hooked on the idea of, "Hey, want to create your own thing?" Then I started this blog, without really having the intention to actually make this something. That was in 2014 when everyone was saying, "Blogging is dead. Blogging was five years ago cool." But, hey, guess what? It was still cool.

I just quickly noticed in the company or after a few years, that this isn't really for me. I do like to program and like coding, but there are so many other things I'm also interested in like content creation and writing. That was fun, trying out new technologies, creating YouTube videos. Even after two, three years of blogging you get aware of a lot of different hats.

You've got to do content marketing, you've got to be on Twitter, you've got to write emails, you've got to write sales pages. You've got to think about so many more things that you just usually don't or can't do when you're employed as a developer. I think back then there was a term, multipotential, and I felt like I liked to wear all the different hats.

It's fun to code on Monday, write marketing emails on Tuesday, have sales calls on Wednesdays, and live my life on my own terms.

Brian: Yeah. How many years have you been doing this developer educator content creation?

Simon: I started the blog in 2014, so that has to be nine years. I don't know exactly, around that time, probably a year later or so I started the YouTube channel. You can still find my early videos which are embarrassing, looking back on them. But that's actually a good sign that I started at the right time.

Brian: If you're not embarrassed, you haven't made enough progress.

Simon: Yeah, exactly. So I've been at this for quite long, but honestly, I'm not really a great creator. I've seen other content creators come up just during the COVID pandemic and they had a spike of subscribers, they went from 0 to 200,000 on YouTube in a year, and meanwhile I'm just grinding along for eight years and just crossed 50,000. So I'm here for the slow and the long term game.

Brian: Yeah. The slow and long term, it is also sustainable and I definitely have noticed a couple folks here. Well, I say folks here, the person that comes to mind is Theo. Theo I consider a friend, he's out here in San Francisco, and he went from 0 to I guess almost 100, I'm not even sure where he's at.

Simon: I guess more now.

Brian: Yeah, he definitely has a style.

Simon: He's unique, he's unique.

Brian: Yeah. Very unique, and was able to grow an audience based on that. But also came out of Twitch and then there's Census Content Creation and that influencer marketing piece as well.

Simon: It's the same for the Primer Gene, these people, they just have strong opinions, they have strong visuals and they're just unique beings. Same also for Wes Boss, you just hear the voice and you know, "Okay, this is Wes Boss." There's just a few people in the space and you immediately know who's talking.

Brian: Yeah, it's interesting because Prime is another person who... I started up live streaming around the same time Prime did, we both had very similar, less than 50 concurrent streamers and dabbled in YouTube. I think when he switched to a YouTube focus, that's where he saw a lot of his growth. But yeah, we could talk ad nauseum too about this content creation game because I think there's a lot of value in figuring out how to build that repeatable cycle.

You mentioned Smart Passive Income, I'm familiar with that guy as well from his early days. I remember I stumbled on his YouTube. But I think it really comes down to consistency. You had mentioned you segment your days where maybe you have a sales day and maybe you have a marketing day.

I found me, personally, having structure in how I approach in even running a company, or even where I was doing DevRel, having structure where I code on Fridays makes it easier to come back and be consistent. Even if it's only one day. But I'm curious, you mentioned you're part of the Ionic community and you have the Ionic course and series.

Are you connected with the company? Do you show up at their meetups? To what extent do you have connections to the community while you're creating this content?

Simon: I do have pretty good connections to them. I always kept talking to the CEO on Slack, and I can always DM them and they basically immediately reply to me. But I've been never really part of the Ionic company, nor have I actually met a single person from them because I'm here in Germany. I haven't been to a lot of conferences, to be honest, maybe this will change next year.

Ionic is from Madison in the United States and I'm not the biggest fan of flying so there are a few barriers between me and Ionic. But we do have active interactions, and actually since this year we do have a little agreement that I create some content for them. This is a pretty nice deal we figured out after. But this took us many, many years.

Brian: Yeah, you just kept showing up.

Simon: Yeah, I consistently kept showing up. To be honest, I sometimes hear this from other content creators, that when they're free, when they're self employed, they don't know how to do stuff. Some days they're just, I don't know, playing Zelda the whole day. To be honest, this didn't happen for me in the last five years. I don't know why, but I keep having my own plan.

I go to work in the morning here in my room in our home, and there's basically never a day where I just slack off. I mean, if I'm sick, if I get sick I take the time off. But otherwise, I'm pretty self motivated. I think I never missed a newsletter or Tuesday tutorial release in the last four or five years, so there's a new tutorial basically every week and, yeah, that speaks to the consistency of my approach. Again, it's probably not the best. Others are growing faster. But you can always compare to others and I'm happy with how things are right now.

Brian: That's awesome. I've always written blog posts and podcasting, this podcast has been around for a while. But I never did video outside of tutorials where I didn't show my face, essentially, for solving a problem at work and stuff like that. But it was the cadence of setting yourself up for consistent wins.

I also set up a newsletter during the pandemic, I found so much reward and value to be like, "I've got a thing to do. What have I done in the last week? Let me put it in the newsletter." Extremely rewarding. But I wanted to move into some of the other stuff that you're working on, you mentioned Galaxies.dev, and then there's Dev Attic, is Dev Attic the umbrella for all the stuff you're doing or what is Dev Attic?

Simon: Yeah. Actually before we forgot a D in the document, so it's Devdactic.

Brian: Devdactic, yeah.

Simon: Anyway, it's just a random name. A friend of mine bought that domain eight years ago and then I started logging in, and he gave it to me. It has a relevance to Dev, so development, and Didactic which is teaching the stuff to yourself, so I figured this out afterwards. It's basically the platform I started blogging on and where I built up my community, I grew a newsletter on there and I just published all my stuff.

In the beginning it was actually a bit scattered, all over the place, CSS and web stuff. But I quickly noticed back then in 2015, I think, that people enjoyed much when I created Ionic tutorials because it was, back then, a pretty new framework. That's usually the chance to...

In hindsight I know why I became successful, because I was the first to write about it and I did everything right that the gurus usually tell you, like, "Pick a niche, write about it, become the expert." But I didn't really understand until I was four years in or so that people considered me an expert on the topic.

I never really felt like an expert in Ionic, and I still, honestly, to this day... I pretty much know every Ionic component and all the properties you can use and everything that's available, and their services and how the whole Ionic universe works together. But there are people a lot better at Angular or people a lot better at React. That's what's essential as well to build Ionic applications, so even to this date, I accept I'm an expert in the Ionic framework itself, but not really beyond it.

Brian: Okay, cool. So Galaxies.dev, that is, you mentioned, React Native but is it broader than React Native?

Simon: Yeah. The whole idea started last year simply because I was like, "I have been doing Ionic, Angular for seven years," and at some point you want to look outside the bubble and see what's going on. Also because I noticed React is in the JavaScript world, the biggest thing. It's not Angular, although we might say this year, Angular is going strong for Angular, isn't it? The V16 release?

Brian: Yeah, there's a lot of new things.

Simon: There's a whole lot going on. It's not shifting the tides to Angular, the React community is just too big at this point I think. But there's a whole lot going on in the Angular world that makes it feel like a really fresh breath of air. Last year I just wanted to do something else, and I felt like Ionic Academy is not the place to post flutter content or to post React Native content, so I thought, "Well, if I want to expand, if I want to grow, if I want to get YouTube bigger, I have to get into other content as well."

I'm serving this niche of Ionic people, completely great, everyone who's getting in touch with Ionic will definitely run across one of my tutorials. It's just no chance that they Google something and never see me, it's just impossible. So I wanted to build up my own platform also because Ionic Academy was built with WordPress. Nothing against WordPress, and it worked great with a membership site, but I wanted more control.

So we set up this project, I actually hired a designer for this, I hired an additional developer. We created this whole project from the ground up with new designs, but this whole branding around galaxies and the galactic theming. It is built with SvelteKit and Superbase as the backend, so it's a pretty modern stack right now. I launched it earlier this year with the focus on all things web, cutting edge web technology, and I found this to be interesting.

But the problem is that it didn't really get product market fit or whatever you want to call this, because people usually want to learn just one topic. They want to learn React or they want to learn Next. They don't want to learn Quick today and tomorrow Flutter, and three days later Gatsby. That's just not the reality of how the world works. I reconsidered, I still love the platform and the branding on the platform. What's closest to me is actually cross platform development.

That's what I love, I love building mobile applications from web technologies and so I could decide between Flutter and React Native, and currently I enjoy React Native the most and so I decided that my main focus for the next time is going to be Galaxies for React Native. There's also a dedicated landing page for everyone interested at Galaxies.dev/ReactNative, or you can sign up and that's probably becoming the main thing of Galaxies.

But because it's like a brand, it's not the React Native Academy. It could becoming anything. If I enjoy this a lot, in three years there could be Flutter content and there could be other course creators publishing content on Galaxies as well. That's ultimately my plan for it.

Brian: Yeah, it's interesting that you went through the exploration and found the product market fit. It's course, content learner fit or whatever. But I guess that's a really good insight as well because I think the Ionic Academy makes sense because if I want to learn on it really quickly, because I needed to solve a problem or I'm about to start a new job, I will definitely go to there.

I guess the multi course language things, I tend to not sign up. I signed up to Level Up Tuts and Egghead, and I definitely have got enough content out there where I no longer subscribe. But with things like a lot of Kent C. Dodds courses, I get a lot of value out of so I just pay for that course and then I go through it. If I have to go back, Kent will send updates to it pretty consistently for the first couple of years and I get a lot of value out of that.

So I talked to Scott Tolinsky, I mentioned the podcast that I had a couple years ago. We talked a lot offline about course creation and I ended up creating a course for Level Up Tuts as well a couple years ago. I really enjoyed the experience, which was about getting into Git and GitHub. It was something that it's one of those things where you use it all the time but you don't know what you know, and then when you go to do the course you're like, "Oh. I know what it's like to be a beginner again."

I get to slow down and take a step to explain things, and explain how things go. I found it extremely rewarding to do that. I would love to do another course, just pick a topic that I feel like I am too good at and slow down and start writing out the early steps of it. I don't know, do you get that same experience? I don't know if you go back to the beginner Ionic stuff, but maybe you get that with the React Native stuff now.

Simon: If you ever want to do a course, Galaxies.Dev is open for you. We're all gunning for you. Yeah, I 100% feel this right now. This was actually very challenging over the last couple of weeks when I figured out that Galaxies isn't working, so I was worrying about this a lot because I really invested a lot of money into the development and the branding. The platform just didn't work out. And so I was reconsidering what did I do wrong, do I actually enjoy all of this.

I try to follow with all the web development news for like six or nine months, and honestly after nine months I already felt like I burned out on it. There's just so much going on. If you focus, "Oh, Quick Release. Oh, this released. Oh, that released. Oh, Vercel released something. Oh, there's a new Tailwind series. There's five that I've got to pick up." There's just so much going on, and right now with my new focus on Ionic and React Native it feels basically like coming home.

So I get started with React Native, I create cool stuff that I already know people love and usually like because I know from my tutorials on YouTube what's popular. There's a handful of topics that's basically always popular. That's user authentication, how do I upload an image? How do I make API calls? How does navigation and routing work? How do I pass around parameters in my application?

All these basic, essential things, push notifications, local notifications, SQLite, storage. I can just learn all of this with React Native and I immediately try to put this into videos right now. I don't know what I don't know, so my React skills and React Native skills are going to be limited. Probably if Kinsey Dots would look at my videos, he would say, "Oh god, what is Simon doing? This is horrible."

But there's a level of the code gets the job done, and most of the time it's just enough to get a first impression of how it works and then later you can still fine tune it. I'm lucky that I don't worry too much about what I do wrong or if I say something wrong about use state or use effect or whatever. I just don't care, to be honest.

Brian: Yeah. To be fair, I would say Kit probably would not look at your course and be like, "What's going on here?"He's a super empathetic guy. I did want to ask a question about 2023, cross platform web development, you're now jumping into React Native. I feel like a couple of years ago Swift UI Kit no longer needed to use Ionic or React Native, and it doesn't seem like that was true.

It seems like things just continued to get better. Then also I look at things like Expo, Expo has come a really long way to give you a good experience. There's a couple of other tools like Expo that are coming out. So if I want to build a mobile app today, what's your opinionated response?

Simon: Yeah. So basically in my eyes, the three biggest contesters in this space are Flutter, React Native and Capacitor. Capacitor is most likely the unknown here of the three, everybody knows about Flutter from Google and React Native from Meta. But Capacitor is from the Ionic company and some people refer Ionic with Capacitor. Actually you can throw in Capacitor in any kind of web probably. If you just have a React web application, you can install Capacitor and build a native mobile app from your codebase.

Really this takes 10 minutes, and people are shocked how easy this is actually because Capacitor will basically wrap your web application in a Native container and create the Android Studio and iOS project, and you can run it on a device as a Native application. Ionic is just the UI on top of this, which makes your application really look and feel Native. So you usually get the best experience if you use Ionic with Capacitor, and then just select Angular, React or View or whatever JavaScript framework you prefer. However, there's a limitation of these applications.

They also run in a web view and that's always been what people say about hybrid applications or cross platform applications, whatever we want to call them. You're a bit limited because you're run in a web view. Some animations or stuff just won't be as native as it could be, because you're limited by the web browser. However, there are so many cases where this doesn't matter.

All the internal business tools, they can benefit so much from people who understand JavaScript and the web also writing their Native applications for internal tools. Ionic has tons of enterprise customers, for example. I've also built Ionic applications for the App Store, and you've probably used some. You usually don't notice a difference. However, with React Native it's a bit different.

I feel React Native is in the center, React Native is the best of both worlds. Capacitor is webbish-like, then we've got React Native in the middle which is still a bit web like, but more native like. The output feels already really native, but especially with the stuff that Expo is doing. I've been in contact with the Expo team and checked out the FJS Conference recently and what they announced.

Basically Expo is bringing the web back into React Native so it's interesting. Initially we had React Native which was made for iOS and Android after we had React for the web, and now we're going back from React Native to the web, so they're adding a file base routing to React Native. They added SEO tags so you can build your React Native application, and also make it available for the web with an export which is quite interesting.

I think this approach is going to be awesome. The output of React Native feels definitely more native, usually. But you got to opt into the downsides of React like there's tons of packages, there's no defined UI. I just made a video about the nine most popular React Native UI libraries because I just couldn't find one I should use. Should I use Native Base? React Native Paper? TamaGUI? Everyone's just coming up with a new UI library.

So you've got all of this, and then at the other end of the spectrum I think you have Flutter. Flutter is interesting because it's DART so it's not really for the usual or typical web developer because web developers know JavaScript in general, and for Flutter you need to understand DART. If you've got like five years of experience developing, it doesn't really matter.

Every language has a for loop and an if and an else, and then a bit of other stuff. But it's different, and I think Flutter is a lot more than a Swift UI. So building your UI is not about diff elements and flex, and feeling like a Bob Ross artist putting together the elements. No, Flutter is more like the German approach. "Here, this widget, this widget, this widget, this widget."

You just constantly build this tree of widgets and you feel like a machine putting this together. But to be honest, the output is really, really great, what you get. It's actually not a native application, they just render everything with this Gaia engine and draw every pixel on the screen, but it looks perfectly native and they have tons of components built into this. This feels more like Swift UI because you've got this library of tools available.

Going back to what's the best, there really is no best. People want to know this all the time. Yeah, probably if I took a stand for this, then I'd be more popular because I know Theo, for example, never used Flutter. "You should never use Flutter because they have no code push." And I'm like, "Yeah, but some companies don't need code push, and then Flutter is actually great."

So I think this highly depends on your use case, on your customers, what do they expect, what's your development team like, can you afford a native app? I mean, if you have a team of 10 native developers, then, yeah, great. Just build a native app, it's going to always be the best. But to save cost and money, there are different approaches and these three are usually all great.

I would just give everyone the advice, just create some projects to get used to it and see what the outcome looks like. You're definitely going to be surprised with how far we've come with cross platform development in 2023.

Brian: Amazing. Yeah, it depends. It's the standard answer is it depends, and it's true because I think when React Native was getting... I don't think Airbnb is still on React Native, but when it was really getting popular, Airbnb took React Native to another level, and they kind of broke everyone's brain when it came to iOS and mobile apps where mobile apps all had the same drop downs, the same interactions.

Airbnb is like, "No, we're just going to design a beautiful experience on the phone." And it changed how people even approached, like, "Oh wow, we don't have to use standard iOS elements to make an iOS app. We can do whatever we want." Again, well, I say again because we were talking before we hit record, when I was saying the rising tide raises all boats when it comes to comparing technologies.

But I'll say that for the listener so they have it in the recording, but yeah, I feel like this is a pretty enlightening conversation. I'm excited to thumb through some of your course material, especially React Native stuff. I've been pretty far removed from doing mobile apps for a while, I built a mobile app when I worked at Netlify that never shipped. That was a fun, little side project.

I took my Fridays and built a React Native app to look at your deploys. I have a feeling I'll be building a mobile app pretty soon for Open Sauce. We've been looking at... Well, I've been looking at React Native because I did a lot of Swift and Objective C back in the day, but I'm a web developer at this point so I wouldn't mind having the same mental model to be able to build stuff.

Simon: Yeah, I think it's just an awesome skill to have as a web developer, to be able to build native apps. Now my daughter is turning five this year and I'm looking forward to creating some cool, little iPad games for her soon if she gets a crazy idea.

Brian: Nice. Excellent. Yeah, my son is nine and we did do some JavaScript games I think last summer, just a couple tutorials to show him the basics. Maybe this summer we end up going a little deeper.

Simon: A little bootcamp.

Brian: Yeah, cool. So appreciate the conversation, I do want to transition us to picks. These are things that we're jamming on, could be music, food, could be fun games, tech related, all above. It all works. If you don't mind, I'll go first. My first pick is the Super Mario Movie, I got a chance to watch this in the Grand Theater here in Oakland, it's a great theater, it's very old.

But got a Sunday matinee with the kids and we watched it, and then just yesterday it showed up on Amazon Prime for purchase, so I was like, "Oh, let's just go for it." So we watched it twice yesterday. The kids watched it once without me, and then we watched it again before bedtime. It's a great movie.

I think there's a lot of questions around Chris Pratt being Mario and the choice of voice actors, but I think they did a good job with that where you didn't feel like Chris Pratt was playing Mario or Jack Black was playing Bowser. Well, there's some scenes where you know it's Jack Black. Yeah, I thought they did a great job and they pulled in all the elements that we all loved to see when we were kids playing the games, they put it in the movie. There's a lot of Easter eggs as well.

Simon: The good thing is in Germany it's always the German voice anyway, so I don't really know the original voice. But I saw the poster of this when we were at a cinema as well. Excited.

Brian: I highly recommend it, it's definitely fun. If you ever played any Mario games growing up, there's a lot of them, and, yeah, they just had a lot of elements. I think a lot of the Mario Kart scenes were hamfisted in, it felt like, "Of course you're doing this."

Simon: Yeah, nostalgic.

Brian: Yeah, it was basically just that through and through. I can't imagine they don't do a second one, this seems like a cash cow for sure.

Simon: Awesome.

Brian: I do have a second pick which is Plain.com, so P-L-A-I-N, which is kind of weird to see a .com so short for a new project. I don't know if they renamed or whatever. But if you ever use Intercom or Zendesk for live chat, this is that too as well. I think one of the coolest features that I've seen so far is... Well, honestly I haven't actually set up live chat or any sort of support tools myself but this was pretty easy, and it's pretty straightforward to set up a help@opensauce email and then point that to your live chats.

That way every email that goes to your help email goes directly to an interface where you can do support tickets. So the goal is basically have interns and operations staff all be able to answer questions about whatever about the project. This is probably one of the easier setups I've done to setup a live interaction chat bubble, so definitely check it out, Plain.com. P-L-A-I-N.

Simon: Looks good. Yeah, so it's my turn, I guess?

Brian: Yeah.

Simon: I'm going to first pick something I'm probably pretty late to. Just the other week I got started with GitHub Copilot in my code and it's been amazing. Everyone has been talking about this, since I think December or so. I don't know when Copilot actually started. I just installed it a few weeks ago. It's just amazing, in terms of code generation.

I'm doing some writing for Galaxies which is based on markdown files as well and if I put what this is about in the title and description, the post writes itself basically. Copilot gives me every single line. I usually put in all the code blocks that I want to write about in a tutorial and then Copilot knows everything. But also for coding, for some stuff, it's just amazing if you have some default stuff where you want to iterate over a map and create elements, Copilot just knows that other people have done this and how firebase functions work and how you're going to call them.

The stuff is very new that's not working very well yet, and I'm really looking forward to Copilot X so I can stay in my IDE and not go to ChatGPT and ask for coding advice, but just do the conversation in my project and Copilot already knows about the code. But honestly, it's already worth every dollar you've got to spend on it if you're allowed to use it.

Brian: Yeah, check with your security professionals at your company. Have you applied for Copilot X yet?

Simon: I think so, yeah.

Brian: Okay, yeah. I submitted my email to say, "Hey, give me access," and I'm still waiting. So I'm looking forward to it.

Simon: Yeah. I also like this CLI thing coming out, right? GitHub AICLI, that also looked amazing. I saw a preview on Colby Fair's channel.

Brian: Yeah, I do have access to that one. It is pretty cool, yeah. It's interesting, so it's a team at GitHub called GitHub Next and they just do a bunch of skunkworks projects to do random stuff. Copilot came out of this team originally a couple summers ago, and yeah, they're just trying cool things. It seems like everything is going to be AI focused. I was actually super interested in the GitHub Blocks feature which I have access to as well, but I felt that feature was a little clunky so I didn't really know what to do with it. Had a lot of promise, but, yeah, Copilot X, would love access. I need to ping my GitHub contacts, please, please let me have access.

Simon: Me too, please. My second pick is a game actually, or actually it's a game company. I'm just going to pick Supercell here. There's a reason. I like to play a casual mobile game and I'm constantly looking for good games. To be honest, I don't know if I just need better quality games or if I just want to have games from the 90s like Age of Empires on my phone. But I just can't find games that really satisfy me anymore.

I play stuff for a few weeks or two months, and then I'm like, "Meh, this is boring. I just want my money, I'm just going to go." Just yesterday I installed my favorite games again, which are Clash of Clans and Clash Royale. What Supercell is creating, I've played basically every Supercell game. They also have Hay Day, I have played this farm with my friends and my family for years, really.

For years we've been playing Hay Day, and it's just always been fun. Now I come back to Clash Of Clans and it just looks great. Clash Royale, the same. The only problem with that is it's too competitive for me, so once I lost like five or six times in a row and I took my phone and I actually destroyed the camera by biting into my phone. Then I also lived in fear for three days that I've eaten some broken glass and that I would die, so I'm very-

Brian: All right, time for a break.

Simon: Yeah, I can't recommend that. So if you're not into competitive playing, don't check it out. But honestly, if you want high quality mobile games that you can casually play, Supercell is the studio to look for. They've got like four or five games and they've announced a few others which they still haven't released as far as I know. But usually there should be something in it for you if you want to have a casual play, which at some point in your life you just become a casual player and just play for five minutes here and there.

Brian: Yeah, amazing. Yeah, definitely Clash of Clans awhile ago but I didn't get into it. But also I do know my limit for competitive gaming. I'd rather go play Tomb Raider by myself or The Last of Us or something like that. Stories are my type of gaming. Competitiveness makes it way too intense, and my palms get sweaty.

Simon: That's a cool thing about Hay Day or stuff like that, you just go to your farm and you feed the animals and you make some bread.

Brian: Cool. Yeah, that's my speed. Well, thanks for sharing. Now I'm going to be tempted to download this, at least Hay Day because I didn't know they had that game out. But yeah, now I'm tempted to go download a new iPad game and just have at it at this point.

Simon: Hope you enjoy it.

Brian: But with that, Simon, thanks for the conversation. Folks, check out Galaxies.dev, and keep an eye out for the React Native content. But also if you wanted to get into Ionic content, then obviously there's a whole plethora of content out there for you, so check it out. And listeners, keep spreading the jam.