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

I'm interested in the opinion of React Native from companies who chose to build their mobile apps with React Native and have been doing so for at least a year. RN passes the first-week smell test really well. How has it held up for you in production? How has it held up for dev teams of ~10 or more? Pros and cons?

I run a mobile team of ~30 folks. In 2015 we experimented with RN for 3 months before deciding that it was not a good fit for us. I'm interested in stories from the alternate reality where we took the react-native path instead.

I'm NOT particularly interested in stories about single devs making prototypes for a weekend. React Native has a delightful experience for this use-case, but it does not directly transfer to being a good experience for a larger team with serious product goals.

Thanks

I'd love to know this as well, as we're currently evaluating making the leap between RN and Xamarin for our startup.

(ideal world, I favor just using the native stacks for iOS and Android but we are short staffed)

Builds are very complicated. It's not as simple as 'JS is your whole app'. The package manager is getting better at injecting native code (react-native link) but has a long way to go.

I spent a lot of time debugging RN. The instant reload feature comes with hangups. Tracebacks don't always appear.

Navigation isn't cross-platform.

Interacting with native APIs is nightmarish. JS wasn't built for java interop.

I'm a react native consultant, so I've seen several different projects (of all different sizes). Overall, I've been super happy with React Native, and would easily recommend it to anyone looking to build an Android and iOS version of the same app.

There have been a lot of changes since 2015 - and the overall experience has gotten quite a bit better. There are many more modules available for both platforms (in 2015 you probably found a lot of modules only supported iOS and not Android) - and in general the whole ecosystem is more stable.

That said: not everything is perfect. React Native moves quickly, so there are sometimes frustrating bugs (especially in new releases) that can take a bit of time to resolve. Also, it's not a great fit for every type of app. 3D games are an obvious example of when you'd want to go native (or use unity).

However, after having done native iOS development and react native development, I can say that react native is still faster (development speed). In practice I find that I can reuse 95% of the code between iOS and Android, so it's been a great win for the teams I've been on.

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 native apps (native/react native/web views) with 90+% code sharing. We also added a bunch of features (regex based routing, etc) to help with seo. We do all of this from our single framework based on react.

We had a lot of front end 'frameworks' in use and no consistency. Now we do. It's been a lot of work, but for us totally worth it.

We also have done a bunch of optimizations to make react fast, including how we handle webviews in a react native/native app. It's seamless. I'd like to link a video, but proprietary work that isn't done...blah blah blah, company secrets, blah blah blah. We will be releasing another blog post, detailing all the native enhancements soon.