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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?

#31

Post by publicfig »

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.

I'd recommend reading this article about the licensing language that's being disputed now: https://medium.com/@dwalsh.sdlr/react-facebook-and-the-revok...

The author is the same person that has an article on the front page currently arguing that the license for Graph QL DOES have issues (and is following through with Facebook through Github Issues to resolve them), so I think this position is really worth considering.

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

#32

Post by t1amat »

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 react-native-git-upgrade tool.

I've used React Native with a number of languages: JavaScript, JavaScript + Flow, TypeScript and ClojureScript. All of the above, and soon, if not already, ReasonML, are viable language choices. My personal preference is TypeScript and ClojureScript.

The projects I have worked on professionally tend to be highly company branded with a common UI, and I am able to share ~100% of the JavaScript code-base between them (ignoring platform entry points).

An anecdote: recently one of the applications (React Native + TypeScript) was audited by a respected independent security consulting firm to rave reviews by the security team. On the spectrum of risk (Info, Low, Medium, High, Critical) the worst reported issue was a Medium that was due to the platform default ProGuard setting that disabled binary obfuscation for development; enabling required a 1 line config change.

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

#33

Post by rjmunro »

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.

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

#34

Post by mbrock »

In 2015 I began using React Native for a client because I was led to believe that it would be a nice way to bring their web app to iOS and Android. After months of alternating happiness and frustration, we cancelled the project due to many horrible problems involving crashes, lagginess, and poor behavior. I definitely regret that. Probably the ecosystem is more mature now, but back then I found its advertising and hype to really stretch its actual quality.

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

#35

Post by mikesurowiec »

My team has been working on our app for 1.5 years now and of all the technical choices we've made, React Native is probably our favorite. It's taken us through the prototyping stage and all the way to production without many issues. Granted, we're a very small engineering team of 3.

Pros

- We haven't done performance tuning and haven't had any user complaints about performance (it's a multi-channel chat app)

- Most of the time, changes "just work" on both platforms

- Javascript :D

- Development velocity is great, especially w/ UI changes

Cons

- Wish we had better text input control

- You still need someone who knows about native app development on each platform

- Upgrading versions can cause breaking issues (this has gotten better)

- Lesser used 3rd-party packages are often incomplete across platform, so a fair amount of patches

- Changes on one platform have the potential to break the other platform (so testing can require a lot of back and forth)

edit: formatting halp

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

#36

Post by ashark »

archgrove wrote: post #17

No, I don't regret it. We picked it for our startup as we wanted a cross platform solution, that genuinely felt native (without the huge effort it takes to make a webapp feel that smooth), and that still gave us a chance to easily native code for certain features. Big wins: - With a little effort, it genuinely feels native. - The talent pool is much larger. We didn't hire React Native folk, just good JS people who pi…

> - The JavaScript ecosystem is still insane. Our project has ended up with one of the most complex build processes I've worked with (and I've worked with autotools).

God is that true. The JS ecosystem as a whole is actually, no BS, crazy, and their build jenga-tower especially is insane.

With RN, though, we've only really had problems with it when using Expo. Taking that out of our stack pretty much solved our periodic whole-day-wasting build problems, and excising it and other tightly-coupled libs freed us to upgrade RN from time to time, which is nice. A++++, would aggressively remove RN-specific 3rd party libs again.

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

#37

Post by htormey »

I'm a native iOS developer who does a lot of React Native consulting. Earlier in the year I gave a talk on the pro's and cons of React Native which you can watch here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZ4zQWgajBg&t=746s

The main reasons I got into React Native was a combination of frustration with the state of Swift last WWDC and an opportunity to try it out with a client who just had a React Web team.

I don't regret the decision at all. If you are thinking about using React Native in a project here are some things to consider:

Maybe we should use React Native:

- We know JS / React

- We have lots of web developers but few mobile

- Our design is brand-focused

- We're willing to invest in RN

- We want to get into OSS

- We want OTA code updates

Or maybe we shouldn't:

- We don't know JS / React

- We already have an iOS team and an Android team

- Our designs are heavily platform-specific

- We don't have the time or money for an RN team / OSS

Pros:

- Cross-platform

- Performant, native feel (with some effort)

- Great developer experience

- Push updates over-the-air

- Strong community

- Backed by Facebook

Cons:

- Early

- Unstable (bugs, APIs)

- Ecosystem not fully developed

- Polished apps are high effort

- You may need native code (so JS + Obj-C + Java)

If you are a fully native shop, with no JS dev's that use React, it doesn't make all that much sense to rewrite your app using React Native.

If you have no native team, are familiar with React, then React Native makes a lot of sense.

If you are are a company with native apps and a web team that knows React then using React Native inside your existing app for growth, etc, makes a lot of sense.

Going all in on React Native is a big investment and I wouldn't recommend it for many use cases (multimedia, etc). Right now it definitely has some rough edges (navigation, upgrading versions, etc) but it can dramatically increase the productivity of your front end teams.

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

#38

Post by sandGorgon »

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.

Same here. We were seriously considering it, until the licensing issue.

In fact, we continue to use Reactjs - because it is something that we can rip out and replace if push comes to shove. But a React Native app once released will live in the wild - which means the patent exposure cannot be mitigated easily.

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

#39

Post by whostolemyhat »

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're also having trouble upgrading the version of React Native due to versions having breaking changes. I know it's technically still not v1.0, but in reality a lot of companies are using it so having a stable version would be nice. Since it's unstable, many libraries haven't updated to compensate so you run into the same problem as above, tracking down precise versions of dependencies which also still do what you want.

The build process feels pretty rickety and seems to rely on a lot of global state - I spent a while checking how we could update dependencies, but when I rolled back to a stable version I was unable to build even after re-installing node modules etc. I was only able to fix it after opening Xcode, removing all pod libraries and re-adding them; I have no idea why that worked, and there are very few clues on Github or Stack Overflow as to what specific errors mean. Fixing my build step took the best part of a day.

Overall, for a small app like ours, we're just spending far too long on non-development overhead, like fixing build systems or checking dependency versions, and will probably move to native versions at some point in the future. It may be a pain maintaining two separate versions, but we'll have solid integrations with payment gateways and lots of documentation and info on Github/SO for problems.

I like React and the idea of React Native, but at the moment it just feels far too unstable and unpolished to use. I'd like to use it in the future, but probably not until it's had a major version release.

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

#40

Post by woah »

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?
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