Mobile Development

I've been thinking about writing my own workout logger that better fits my use and I'd like to hear some recommendations on what language or framework to use.

I don't have any prior experience with mobile development nor with Java or Kotlin, and C++ I suspect would be needlessly low level for the features I'd like to include.

Features is like to include in the app is capability of recording video, playing video/audio, creating graphs and opening up in-app tabs. Fancy ui and animations is not of much importance.

Any recommendations on what languages to use and what libraries might be of interest to get going?

An Android user lands on a landing page on my website. He gets assigned a new UUID which gets stored in the DB.

There's a button on a page to download an my Android app. The app registers its own scheme -- my-custom-app://, if this matters.

He downloads and launches it, immediately or in a few days.

Question: within the Android app, how will I determine whether or not the Android phone it's being run on the same that was used to open the landing page on my website? That is, track the user between a mobile browser and the app.

I need to track the new users only -- the ones who don't have or not run the app yet.

Condition: the landing page, after the app has been downloaded, may not ask the user to reload itself or to open any link with a tracking_id/user_id via the scheme of app. That is, a user should land on the page, download the app if not yet already, open it by himself and get identified.

Is there some kind of unique ID, be it Android device ID, fingerprint? The one to which an html page will have access to via JS.

I'm aware that an IP of user may change, and that this tracking approach is prone to an error. But it's results in more or less accurate one, it'll do.

Also, the target user isn't technically save, therefore simple techniques will work.

Shameless repost. What's your experience with web wrappers?

Anyone here develop in Ionic? I'm curious as to the DX vs React Native. What's the learning curve like? I'm primarily a React dev, so RN seemed like a natural fit. But being as Ionic is web-first and able to easily convert to a PWA is that a greater strength for Ionic as it's agnostic to the framework / library used to build it?

What would be the advantage of building in Ionic, utilizing say, React.js and Tailwind as my toolkit? Are there disadvantages with that approach vs using RN and Nativewind?

I understand that Native functionality vs. Web functionality is different and slanted towards Native -- but it would seem that Ionic makes a strong play for ease of use for someone that already knows how to dev a web app.

TL;DR - anyone ship an Ionic app, and if so is it (> =) || (< =) your expectations?

Welcome friends!

I'm looking forward to some good discussion around best practices, different techniques and technologies, and whatever other topics fall into the bucket of mobile dev.

I'm primarily a React Native developer (when I'm working in mobile dev) and do all sorts of other work in WP, GD, React.js, Next, Gatsby and more. As a freelancer it all falls to what the best fit is for the customer. But enough about me, what's your story? Favorite stack? What do you like about mobile development? What are some things you despise about it?