New Framework Uses PHP for Native Desktop Apps
NativePHP is a framework for building native desktop applications and, after two years of work, the team has released version 1. It allows PHP developers to create cross-platform apps using PHP, HTML, CSS and JavaScript. However, it’s not a completely new framework, the documentation explains.
“NativePHP is not a completely new framework that you need to learn,” the documentation stated. “It builds on top of the incredible affordances and ecosystem that Laravel provides. Before using NativePHP, you’ll want to be familiar with building web applications using Laravel.”
NativePHP includes a combination of elements, including:
- A collection of classes to let developers interact with a host operating system features.
- Tools for building and bundling native applications.
- A static PHP runtime, so the app can run on any user’s device.
Developers can use the UI toolset of their choice to build the frontend. Out of the box, it includes:
- Window management.
- Menu management.
- File management.
- Database support (SQLite).
- Native notifications.
React Native Boosts Android App Startup Time
React Native released a new version this month, and among the improvements are a faster startup time for Android apps.
The updates will speed Android apps “by a significant amount,” the team wrote in its announcement blog post. Previously, React Native compressed the JavaScript bundle inside the Android Package Kit, which is the file format Android uses to distribute apps. That created a situation where Android had to uncompress the JavaScript bundle before the app could start, which obviously slowed down startup. Now these bundles will be uncompressed by default.
React Native version 0.79 also upgrades its JavaScript bundler to Metro 0.82. Metro 0.82 supports faster startup and package exports, the team said.
Metro o.82 “uses deferred hashing to improve the speed of first yarn start typically by over 3x (more in larger projects and monorepos), making your development experience and CI builds faster on a daily basis,” the team wrote.
This release of Metro also promotes package.json, exports and imports field resolution to stable. The team wrote that the exports resolution was introduced in React Native 0.72, and imports support was added in a community contribution. Both are enabled by default for projects on React Native 0.79.
What does this do for frontend developers? It opens up new, standards-compliant ways to organize projects, as well as improving compatibility with modern npm dependencies.
The team also handled a number of breaking changes, which are detailed in the post.
The Web Dev Struggle Is Real
Tech influencer Andrej Karpathy is best known as the former director of AI at Tesla, but recently he’s undertaken building web apps — and he’s frustrated with it.
“The reality of building web apps in 2025 is that it’s a bit like assembling IKEA furniture,” Karpathy tweeted. “There’s no ‘full-stack’ product with batteries included, you have to piece together and configure many individual services … ”
He followed that with a long list of those services. He also wrote that he was “embarrassed to share” that it took him three hours to create and configure a Supabase with a Vercel app and resolve a few errors. Supabase is an open-source, Backend as a Service platform that aims to be an alternative to Firebase.
“The second you stray just slightly from the ‘getting started’ tutorial in the docs, you’re suddenly in the wilderness,” he wrote. “It’s not even code, it’s … configurations, plumbing, orchestration, workflows, best practices.”
It’s an interesting thread to read, with a few AI startups popping up to say they’re addressing the challenge. We’ll see. As Karpathy put it, “A lot of glory will go to whoever figures out how to make it accessible and ‘just work’ out of the box, for both humans and, increasingly and especially, AIs.”
