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React Native at Instagram

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Re: React Native at Instagram

#51

Post by iLoch »

kumarm wrote: post #42

I don't think ReactNative has a reason to exist other than Facebook wanting to own Platform (Which they might abandon just like Parse). Good Read: https://www.reddit.com/r/androiddev/comments/5qr9xw/avoiding...

I think you might be confusing Facebook with Google.

Ask any app developer that's used React Native or any web developer that's had to create a native app if it has a reason to exist.

Facebook has hundreds or thousands of React developers that - before React Native - could only develop for web. Now they can move their web developers to their native apps almost seamlessly.

Re: React Native at Instagram

#52

Post by what2 »

htormey wrote: post #45
what2 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems like a big plus for React Native. What are the negatives you have found?

I was at the SF React Native developers meet up the other night, the speaker (Devin Abbott) gave several nice pro/con's slide re react native. Here's a picture of the slides: http://imgur.com/a/T3O7i http://imgur.com/a/z2oIU

Awesome, thanks!

Right now I will wait a little more and see how the tech evolves. Been burned by too many miracle technologies

Re: React Native at Instagram

#53

Post by iamleppert »

They probably traded a really nice iOS codebase that had been maintained and improved upon for something that is going to end up with tons of special cases for when the UI is running on iOS/Android etc and make it incredibly difficult to test, reason about.

Instead of improving the code on each respective platform, you end up with an inbred red-headed step child that shares the limitations and thorns of each, all smushed together.

Now, making a change that once was once limited in scope to a single UI on Android now has the potential to affect both apps in new and exciting (read: unpredictable) ways.

I've been down this path before. There's something incredibly satisfying about reusing code, but there's such a thing as too much of a good thing.

I'd like to see a case study done in a few years once the whiskers have had some time to accumulate on this codebase.

Steve Jobs knew about the perils of this development methodology which is why he specifically put his foot down on technologies like Flash -- which (let's admit it, folks), React Native really has more in common than we'd like to admit.

Re: React Native at Instagram

#54

Post by htormey »

what2 wrote: post #52
htormey wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was at the SF React Native developers meet up the other night, the speaker (Devin Abbott) gave several nice pro/con's slide re react native. Here's a picture of the slides: http://imgur.com/a/T3O7i http://imgur.com/a/z2oIU

Awesome, thanks! Right now I will wait a little more and see how the tech evolves. Been burned by too many miracle technologies

Yeah, it really depends on what your needs are. React Native has a lot of cool features but it also has quite a steep learning curve if you are new to React or new to Native development.

Re: React Native at Instagram

#56

Post by taurath »

iamleppert wrote: post #53

They probably traded a really nice iOS codebase that had been maintained and improved upon for something that is going to end up with tons of special cases for when the UI is running on iOS/Android etc and make it incredibly difficult to test, reason about. Instead of improving the code on each respective platform, you end up with an inbred red-headed step child that shares the limitations and thorns of each, all smu…

As a business decision, it's outsourcing expertise of the platforms to Facebook, which has plenty of resourses working on the problem. True it's been the holy grail as long as I've been a web dev, but outside of a bit of platform lock in risk it seems like it's come a long way with relatively simple apps like Instagram. It's trading expense for risk.

Re: React Native at Instagram

#57

Post by iamleppert »

taurath wrote: post #56
iamleppert wrote: post #53

They probably traded a really nice iOS codebase that had been maintained and improved upon for something that is going to end up with tons of special cases for when the UI is running on iOS/Android etc and make it incredibly difficult to test, reason about. Instead of improving the code on each respective platform, you end up with an inbred red-headed step child that shares the limitations and thorns of each, all smu…

As a business decision, it's outsourcing expertise of the platforms to Facebook, which has plenty of resourses working on the problem. True it's been the holy grail as long as I've been a web dev, but outside of a bit of platform lock in risk it seems like it's come a long way with relatively simple apps like Instagram. It's trading expense for risk.

Do you really think there's much expense to having two code bases for simple apps (as you said) like Instagram?

If these apps are written properly most (all) of any custom logic is done server side and they are just presentational only.

In addition, a good developer/engineer/team that's properly focused on mobile (the size of the team of Instagram) should have absolutely no problem supporting two native codebases.

Re: React Native at Instagram

#58

Post by bennyg »

kumarm wrote: post #42

I don't think ReactNative has a reason to exist other than Facebook wanting to own Platform (Which they might abandon just like Parse). Good Read: https://www.reddit.com/r/androiddev/comments/5qr9xw/avoiding...

A lot of that commenter's points are really diatribes without fully understanding RN, or the 3rd party environment around it.

The absolute biggest con with RN is performance. Redux and aggressive shouldComponentUpdates are your friends here. Airbnb's Lottie library (and FB's keyframes) can help with complex animations and the bad perf associated with those.

The dev tradeoffs are 100% worth it.

The end-product tradeoffs are 95% worth it.

We've had to do some things in-house to circumvent some RN bugs, but that time spent there pales by multiple orders of magnitude in comparison to the time saved by starting a cross-platform app from scratch with RN.

Re: React Native at Instagram

#59

Post by bennyg »

iamleppert wrote: post #53

They probably traded a really nice iOS codebase that had been maintained and improved upon for something that is going to end up with tons of special cases for when the UI is running on iOS/Android etc and make it incredibly difficult to test, reason about. Instead of improving the code on each respective platform, you end up with an inbred red-headed step child that shares the limitations and thorns of each, all smu…

So you haven't used RN then?

Re: React Native at Instagram

#60

Post by ergo14 »

codazoda wrote: post #23
a13n wrote: post #16

This is huge. 87-99% shared code between iOS and Android. Someday companies as big as Instagram won't need to have entire separate product teams for separate platforms. > React Native allowed product teams to ship features faster to both our iOS and Android apps. The list below shows the percentage of code shared between the apps for some of the products, which could be used as a proxy to measure how we managed to im…

I'm working on a project where we are recreating a native app using React Native. We've found similar results; about 90% of our code is shared between both platforms. We also build both platforms every time, so both apps match really well. I'm not sold on React yet but this is a major plus to the platform.

Any chance you also evaluated https://www.nativescript.org/? How those two compare?
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