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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?

#41

Post by g00gler »

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.

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

#42

Post by htormey »

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 Android devices. Even newer ones.

One question I have is why did you prefer Typescript over flow? I have just started using the latter and I would be curious to hear your thoughts on the matter.

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

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

#43

Post by johnwheeler »

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?

If you have to ask questions like this, you haven’t been working in the industry long enough.

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

#44

Post by gt_ »

johnwheeler wrote: post #43
woah wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

If you have to ask questions like this, you haven’t been working in the industry long enough.

Haven't been in the industry long enough to do what? Ask questions? It appears you have been working in the industry too long to answer them, which is much worse.

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

#47

Post by websitescenes »

johnwheeler wrote: post #43
woah wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

If you have to ask questions like this, you haven’t been working in the industry long enough.

I was wondering the same thing. It seems like the this may be a case of choosing the wrong tool for the wrong job. Some clarification around the context of the problem could eliminate that possibility. Seems like a fair question.

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

#48

Post by jnbiche »

johnwheeler wrote: post #43
woah wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

If you have to ask questions like this, you haven’t been working in the industry long enough.

It's a reasonable question. It's not clear how much interactivity is required outside of the webview, but if there's very little or none, then it would be perfectly reasonable and simple to use the native mobile APIs to wrap the webview.

And thus avoid all the problems mentioned above.

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

#49

Post by whostolemyhat »

djstein wrote: post #16
anon12051 wrote: post #11

1.50 years since app development started 0.75 years since app was released stuck with old version of rn, upgrades break app new team members onboarding takes forever, environment is extremely tenuous would i use again? no

>stuck with old version of rn, upgrades break app so you have problems you need to sort out with your own codebase. this is not unusual when using any framework. willing to bet this also stems from poor code practices due to the lack of react 'standards' 1.5 years ago / lack of es6+ code >new team members onboarding takes forever, environment is extremely tenuous in terms of onbaording, this is something that can alw…

I had similar issues taking over a project using an older version of React Native. Upgrading is incredibly painful since there's no stable version and libraries don't always update to match. The current release of React Native uses a release candidate version of React, which many of our dependencies haven't yet updated to match, so we're either stuck with an old version with poor compatibility or have to fix dozens of third-party libraries to try to catch up - both are not ideal, and both are caused by constant breaking change releases.
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