I claim to be a smart, forward thinking developer, and I never bothered to learn how to develop for the platform that is propelling our generation into the future. Its always been in the back of my mind: I can't develop native mobile apps.
Then I had an awesome idea (yes, Daily Nanny), and I knew it had to be a mobile app. I consider myself lucky that I decided to invest cumulative months of my free time learning a fairly new platform: NativeScript.
NativeScript lets you use web technologies to develop native mobile apps. I am a web developer. I create websites, and web applications, with Javascript for a living. Swift (the language that iPhone and iPad apps are written in) was essentially Greek to me, and the whole ecosystem seemed too daunting to someone with a full-time job and 2 kids.
One option was to use a framework that just takes a website and turns it into an app. But we've all used those, whether you know it or not. You know those apps that you use that suck? Like you tap to go somewhere, and theres no nice animation like all your other apps? Or you scroll down to the end of a page and it doesn't snap back, like all your other apps? Or you swipe to go back and it doesn't work, like all your other apps? I didn't want that. I wanted Daily Nanny to feel like all the other apps you use on your phone. Thats what NativeScript lets you do.
Another thing it lets you do is develop for iOS (what we currently support) AND Android (what we are currently working on) at the same time. Thats why Daily Nanny's team can be me and my wife (who does not write code), and we can have no money to start a business, and we can still have an app that everyone can use (eventually).
If you are a web developer, or a dabbler, or a web hobbyist, native mobile app development is now within your reach. Daily Nanny was developed using Javascript and the best practices outlined in NativeScript's extensive documentation, but they also have an Angular 2 implementation which is also awesome. It allows you to share code among your web apps and your native apps, which is truly revolutionary.