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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?

#131

Post by whostolemyhat »

muse900 wrote: post #127
whostolemyhat wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main problem we're having is that newer versions of RN use React 16. React 16 has breaking changes, particularly the changes to PropTypes and createClass, which some of our dependencies have already fixed but others haven't. This means to upgrade RN, we need to either submit fixes for all these libs or use a version of RN which still uses React 15, both of which have their own problems, especially since React 16…

Imho, I think you got it wrong here. I don't think you are supposed to make a production RN app out of the bat, by just using 3rd party dependencies. RN isn't wordpress where someone can employ you and say I want this and that and then you go off install 50 plugins and thats it, your project is completed. If you are installing a lot of RN 3rd party dependencies for a production environment then you are doing it wrong…

Cool I'll just roll my own Facebook and Stripe integrations then

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

#133

Post by b_t_s »

snarfy wrote: post #104
GBKS wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As one of the designers of this app, I was skeptical initially if there would be restrictions on customizing common UI components, the smoothness of animations/interactions, usability, performance, etc. You definitely have to put in a bit of extra work (isn't that always the case with making things nice though), but you can get very nice results (and battery usage) with RN for sure on both Android and iOS. Personally…

One of the reasons I brought this up was a recent article about energy efficiency of programming languages.[1] JavaScript is ~2x less energy efficient than Java, so it will eat twice the battery. [1] https://sites.google.com/view/energy-efficiency-languages/re...

"so it will eat twice the battery" may be nearly true on headless boxes running CPU heavy workloads. Mobile apps are about as far from that as you can possibly get. Sure it's probably a measurable impact, but I would expect it's less of an impact than things like how bright the backlighting is, whether you keep GPS usage to a minimum, how well you minimize and batch network communication, etc, etc. CPU is a small part of a phone's power budget and mobile apps spend a lot of time with the cpu largely idle.

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

#134

Post by nihardongara »

We are a team of 4 developers who work on iOS and Android app for Copart. iOS - https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/copart-app-online-salvage-ca... Android - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.copart.mem...

RN has worked really well for in delivering functionalities to both the platforms and even in maintaining a single code and a small team. Our app is a real-time high-intensity auction platform which uses web-sockets to stream data. When we were using native languages to develop app it was very tough to maintain the same feature for both platforms. RN has helped us in tackling this really well. I understand there are some drawbacks of RN but with proper optimization of native code, we can achieve the results really well. I still believe that RN Android is lagging behind RN iOS but it still does a great job compared to other Cross-platform tech stacks.

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

#135

Post by mlsarecmg »

ketzusaka wrote: post #132

JavaScript is a terrible language. Please don’t ruin your app by having it written in JS.

Lots of things have changed since es5. It's actually more than suitable for front end. I am certain that by using react/redux and es2017 you could cut pretty much any native codebase in half and still have it appear and behave cleaner in the end. This is why they are porting these principles to native, for instance in Kotlins Anko, Litho, ComponentKit, ReactXP, or react-native itself.

JS + npm/node also has more modules and components to choose from than any other repository combined. The crippling factor was always the browser, now that that's out of the way, it can build applications native counterparts could not get at given the same amount of money, time and workforce.

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

#136

Post by cnp »

s73ver_ wrote: post #64

A little off topic, but I really, really wish that people would stop trying to make JavaScript be the language of everything. I have zero interest in JavaScript, I don't believe it's a nice language to work in, and the ecosystem is insane. However, given the way things are going, and the way jobs are trending around me, it seems unavoidable.

You should give it another try. The modern ecosystem / DX environment is really fast and slick. I've known a number of native devs from different languages who now love the lang and what it has to offer. But you've gotta go into it with an open mind :)

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

#137

Post by pattrn »

I've had a React Native based fitness tracking app live in both stores for over a year now. If I had to do it over again, I would still choose React Native. It's made the whole cross-platform development process incredibly simple, and it provides excellent tooling out of the box.

Some dependencies on third party libraries made upgrades difficult, but the core library added the functionality I needed eventually, so I no longer run into those issues. Overall it's been pleasant to work with.

iOS app: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/plansible-weight-lifting-jou...

Android app: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.plansible_...

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

#138

Post by rimliu »

mikesurowiec wrote: post #35

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 o…

I still cannot wrap my head around the fact that there are people willingly choosing Javascript over Swift.

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

#139

Post by rimliu »

cnp wrote: post #136
s73ver_ wrote: post #64

A little off topic, but I really, really wish that people would stop trying to make JavaScript be the language of everything. I have zero interest in JavaScript, I don't believe it's a nice language to work in, and the ecosystem is insane. However, given the way things are going, and the way jobs are trending around me, it seems unavoidable.

You should give it another try. The modern ecosystem / DX environment is really fast and slick. I've known a number of native devs from different languages who now love the lang and what it has to offer. But you've gotta go into it with an open mind :)

Modern JS is not that different from old JS. A couple more keywords and some syntax sugar. No proper integers yet.

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

#140

Post by rimliu »

ketzusaka wrote: post #132

JavaScript is a terrible language. Please don’t ruin your app by having it written in JS.

Actually looking at examples of the apps shown here JS does not matter. They still look like webviews. Cross-platfrom is really a misnomer, it should be no-platform. Yeah, it kind of runs on both, and alien on both too.
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