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Ask HN: Companies who adopted React Native over a year ago, do you regret it?

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Re: Ask HN: Companies who adopted React Native over a year ago, do you regret it?

#51

Post by gcb0 »

lilactown wrote: post #28

The team I'm a part of (~14 people) started building two new Android apps and transitioned our iOS apps to React Native a little over a year ago. Overall, I would call it a great success; we have four apps (2 iOS and 2 Android) built from the same codebase, soon to be 5, and React Native has allowed us to be incredibly nimble in developing the framework and features for them. Some things I do regret: 1. We didn't go…

same experience with testing on my side of the woods. but I'm not directly on that team...

Re: Ask HN: Companies who adopted React Native over a year ago, do you regret it?

#52

Post by ballenf »

woah wrote: post #40
whostolemyhat wrote: post #39

Yes, we regret it. Our app is just a wrapper around a webview, and handles things like in-app payments and SDK integrations like Facebook login, in a team of ~10. Our version of React Native is quite far behind which makes using libraries not already in the project difficult: you have to track back through versions to find a compatible version, which then may not be doing what you want since it's an older version. We…

Why are you using RN if your app is just wrapping a web view?

A different way to ask that would be, if it's just a webview why not strip out RN instead of struggling with breaking change upgrades?

Re: Ask HN: Companies who adopted React Native over a year ago, do you regret it?

#53

Post by andrethegiant »

dan_manges wrote: post #30

We have a 15-person engineering team and converted our mobile app to React Native at the beginning of this year. We do not regret it. Our pace of delivery is much faster with React Native than what we were able to achieve building natively. Our app has over 100 screens, and only needing to implement features once to have them on both platforms is nice. The feedback loop when making code changes is much faster, especi…

Do you share any of your code base with a web app?

Re: Ask HN: Companies who adopted React Native over a year ago, do you regret it?

#54

Post by muse900 »

woah wrote: post #40
whostolemyhat wrote: post #39

Yes, we regret it. Our app is just a wrapper around a webview, and handles things like in-app payments and SDK integrations like Facebook login, in a team of ~10. Our version of React Native is quite far behind which makes using libraries not already in the project difficult: you have to track back through versions to find a compatible version, which then may not be doing what you want since it's an older version. We…

Why are you using RN if your app is just wrapping a web view?

On top of that my question to the OP would be, why do they need to search around for libraries that are older than RN. In a team of 10 you can most likely create your own ones, or fork already made libraries and upgrade them to fit your purpose. One of the greatest things with RN so far for my team has been that we can actually write native components and bridge them. Yes RN is changing quite fast in general and most libraries out there might not fit your exact purpose, but I find it quite easy to integrate what I need in our app. (Team of 3, been on production for 8 months, its pretty alright so far)

Re: Ask HN: Companies who adopted React Native over a year ago, do you regret it?

#55

Post by chrisco255 »

g00gler wrote: post #41
dan_manges wrote: post #30

We have a 15-person engineering team and converted our mobile app to React Native at the beginning of this year. We do not regret it. Our pace of delivery is much faster with React Native than what we were able to achieve building natively. Our app has over 100 screens, and only needing to implement features once to have them on both platforms is nice. The feedback loop when making code changes is much faster, especi…

How do you manage 100+ screens? I started building a react native app but decided against it because switching activities seemed to be very hacky compared to native development. Seemed like it'd really get out of hand with 10+ screens. Wix's "React Native Navigation" was too opinionated / inflexible.

The best nav experience I've had with RN is React Navigation: https://reactnavigation.org/

Re: Ask HN: Companies who adopted React Native over a year ago, do you regret it?

#56

Post by btown »

erik_landerholm wrote: post #9

Absolutely not. We went all in on it. We even developed our own open source framework based on it called Gluestick. It's original purpose was to make it automatically isomporphic by running the same code in the browser as on the servers, using node. We also built a component/style library that allows us to make responsive designs into web and mobile apps quickly and easily. Gluestick also allows easy creation of nati…

How are you doing code sharing between web views and native? Is this an (open-source??) high-level component library that conditionally compiles to either 's or 's? Or did you actually find a way to render ReactDOM components within React Native inside some sort of controlled web view? The latter IMO would be a holy grail for companies trying to transition large ReactDOM codebases to native apps gradually.

Re: Ask HN: Companies who adopted React Native over a year ago, do you regret it?

#57

Post by ballenf »

rjmunro wrote: post #33
segmondy wrote: post #10

Haven't used it. Was considering it till I read the license rubbish. I use ionic and I'm quite happy with it. It's not Native, but for 80% of the apps out there it's create and there are lots of native Cordova plugins and you can write your own if you need missing native capabilities.

Just delete the PATENTS file. There is nothing that says you can't do that, and you then have a plain BSD licensed project.

The downvotes suggest no one is taking this seriously, which is good. Because as soon as the first React patent issues such a project would be an immediate willful patent infringer. At least in the US or anywhere else software patents are recognized and have been filed.

Re: Ask HN: Companies who adopted React Native over a year ago, do you regret it?

#58

Post by wiradikusuma »

Especially those who have positive experience, could you share your experience with 3rd party libraries particularly in these particular areas:

  * Layout  
  * Infinite scrolling  
  * REST client  
  * Image handling (loading, displaying, caching) for popular formats  
  * Push notification (Apple's and Google's)  
  * Built-in (not server-side) SQL for storage  
  * Animation (like transitions, fading)  
  * [Added] In-app purchases
The reason I ask is, from my experience with non-native platforms, they look appealing and "production ready" ("Look how quick and concise you can make default UI using our platform!"), but once you go beyond default UI, things get ugly.

These days, those things I listed are arguably pretty standard for modern apps.

Re: Ask HN: Companies who adopted React Native over a year ago, do you regret it?

#59

Post by g00gler »

chrisco255 wrote: post #55
g00gler wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you manage 100+ screens? I started building a react native app but decided against it because switching activities seemed to be very hacky compared to native development. Seemed like it'd really get out of hand with 10+ screens. Wix's "React Native Navigation" was too opinionated / inflexible.

The best nav experience I've had with RN is React Navigation: https://reactnavigation.org/

Looks very good, will have to try it out.

Re: Ask HN: Companies who adopted React Native over a year ago, do you regret it?

#60

Post by lilactown »

htormey wrote: post #42
t1amat wrote: post #32

I have been leading two React Native projects for most of 2017 with experience using the platform since early 2016. I would definitely recommend it today. The two pain points have been 3rd party native modules and platform upgrades but both situations have improved greatly in the last year. Both the platform and the major 3rd party native modules have stabilized a lot, and platform upgrades are pretty easy via the re…

This is a really solid answer. The point about ProGuard can especially bite you if you are adding React Native to an existing application. Also, upgrading native dependencies in React Native is a really big pain point. The quality of Native modules also varies enormously. An example react-native-camera: https://github.com/lwansbrough/react-native-camera Works well on iOS but has all sorts of performance problems on A…

> I'd also love to hear why ReasonML is good.

Not the OP but I've spent the last couple weeks diving into ReasonML [1]. I'll give you the synopsis:

1. Type system is great. Way better than Flow/TypeScript in terms of both ergonomics (my opinion) and soundness

2. Comes out of the box ready to build React apps. Project init is very easy (there's reason-scripts for create-react-app and already boilerplate/generators for React Native apps as well).

2. Writing your own bindings for JavaScript code requires some elbow grease and semi-advanced knowledge of both OCaml and BuckleScript; harder than adding flow annotations or typescript definitions IMO. But once written, it's as easy as an `npm install` for everyone else.

3. Still lots of open questions and unfinished stories - especially around async programming. The built-in promise bindings kind of suck right now. I wrote bindings for Most.js [2] that I hope alleviates some of the pain for now until they get their head on straight.

I've spoken a lot with Cheng Lou and other people working on ReasonML in the discord channel, and they're just great - very helpful and friendly to a beginner like me. The community is small but very good. Feel free to hop in and ask questions and try it out!

[1] https://reasonml.github.io/

[2] https://github.com/Lokeh/bs-most

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