Please speak, if you can, on the mental toll the move to web ecosystem has taken on your native developers that have until now developed on respective native ecosystems. In particularly, I refer to having to work in JS, having to install tens if not hundreds if not thousands npm dependencies in order to do the most routine tasks, having to restart packager and clear cache every few runs, etc.
React Native at Instagram
61–70 of 238 posts
Re: React Native at Instagram
#62As an iOS developer, I had to decide between investing more time in Swift or React-Native. I chose React-Native simply because I thought it will allow me to broaden my mobile development experience and maybe one day stretch to even the Android platform. Furthermore, it improved my javascript skills in general and allowed me to create React web apps as well. I think it is the right choice thus far. Anyone else have si…
I've had a similar experience. I have had to spend time learning both, I think I am just paranoid about job security! Moving from Objective-C to Swift felt a lot more natural than moving to React Native, getting used to Javascript and the web development environment in general is quite daunting. What were your deciding factors when making your decision?
I think job security was one of my decisions too. Another important decision was the fact that I wanted to be able to use React for both web and mobile apps. Mastering JS was a big bonus.
That being said, it's definitely a smart move to invest time in swift (I did play around with some swift libraries), as it does seem the industry "might" move towards some kind of hybrid obj-c and/or swift + React-native app. I've personally decided to invest more time in JS than Swift.
Yes, the React syntax and JS in general also wasn't as easy for me to catch on vs. obj-c (I wrote a lot of C in my previous job). As you write more, you'll get use to it.
Re: React Native at Instagram
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
That seems like a big plus for React Native. What are the negatives you have found?
One big negative for me so far is that you can't go the last mile (sometimes even the first) if you don't already know a lot about both iOS and Android development. I've written an app with Cordova and never really touched xcode or did anything specific for each platform.
Also, every library (addon/plugin/whatever) I've tried to use so far has not been even close to up to date with the current version of RN.
Error messages are beyond cryptic.
I'm sticking with it for now, but compared to traditional web dev, it feels like coding in quicksand.
Re: React Native at Instagram
#64@martinbigio here in case anyone has questions
Probably OT but a bug that's been driving me crazy for a while now. When I open Instagram it reloads the feed every time as if the app had been purged from memory. This means if I accidentally close the app and reopen it my scroll position is lost and thanks to the sort algorithm the feed order has changed and I can't get back to where I was.
To me it seems like the feed is deterministic, that is, even between refreshes it stays the same, and when there are new posts on the top the old ones are still in the same order.
Re: React Native at Instagram
#65I really want to look at React Native, but every time I pull up my Facebook app on my iPhone 6, it can take upwards of 30 seconds before the interface is useable. That's on a very fast connection. So to me the FB app is so slow, it makes me hesitant to give React Native much more thought as you'd figure the FB app would be THE showcase app for it. Maybe I'm the only one?
Someone correct me if I'm wrong but AFAIK the Facebook app isn't really using react native yet, just in very small parts (event dashboard). The rest is still plain old swift and objc.
this is correct
Re: React Native at Instagram
#66They 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…
A lot of the views mentioned were specifically poorly-performing web views... now they're well performing React Native views, and apparently sharing more code.
React Native (node-style cjs or es2015 module) based applications don't have to be poorly written, or ill-tested. I think a lot of your bias is unfounded, since Steve Jobs saw only web applications on iOS initially.
Re: React Native at Instagram
#67This 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…
So like a Qt app then.
Re: React Native at Instagram
#68The dirty little secret about React is that it tries to 'reinvent' the DOM tree, and Web Components will be out soon making it all obsolete. Why not just move to Web Components NOW, and not have to rewrite your view logic in 3 or 4 years. Polymer wins easily. React got a head start, sure, but the W3C standards and native browser support for WebComponents makes React redundant and unnecessary, in the very near future.
Re: React Native at Instagram
#69So I see they have a lot of code reuse between RN iOS and RN Android.
How much, if any, code reuse can there be between React Native and React (proper)?
Re: React Native at Instagram
#70One thing that draws me to RN is over-the-air code updates on iOS.
Are there any other ways of achieving the same result?