Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Transition to React Native

blog.coinbase.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 221 posts

Re: Transition to React Native

#121

Post by EvilEy3 »

intev wrote: post #115
EvilEy3 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's still the most actively developed ecosystem for cross platform apps. Don't believe me? See https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2020 Riiiight, and quickly followed by Xamarin and Cordova. Lol. Of course it is not dead in terms of usage. It is more "dead" for anything complex. I'm looking from a perspective of a best experience, best performance and best integration. If your only reasoning is "we can't aff…

> Riiiight, and quickly followed by Xamarin and Cordova. Lol. I'm confused - is this meant to be a disbelief of the survey? "quickly followed by"? Are we seeing the same thing? Did you see the %s? It is significantly lower. Of course there are Xamarin and Cordova developers still. Especially in Asia. > Who says about moving now? So wait years and see how everything plays out? So basically you have no solution. Clearl…

> I'm confused - is this meant to be a disbelief of the survey? "quickly followed by"? Are we seeing the same thing? Did you see the %s? It is significantly lower. Of course there are Xamarin and Cordova developers still. Especially in Asia.

Oh, I'm sure there are many of them! Just as there are many Visual Basic developers, or people who do everything in Excel.

> So wait years and see how everything plays out? So basically you have no solution. Clearly the issues were pressing enough that they needed a more immediate solution. A solution they thought was worth re attempting despite its previous failures.

No, my solution to the problem would be to rewrite from scratch in native, without waiting for Compose/SwiftUI.

But for some reason it is so much easier to justify rewrite in X, because if it was written in Y, than of course Y is to blame for our shitty practices and lack of developer culture. They neglected best practices, piled crap upon crap and somehow it is native toolkit that is to blame.

Re: Transition to React Native

#122

Post by EvilEy3 »

intev wrote: post #113
EvilEy3 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try to create account, input some gibberish, see "something went wrong" dialog and close it. And define "fine" first. If you mean that it works, sure. But it works slower than truly native application, like Telegram.

By "fine" I mean it does what I expect it to, doesn't throw bizarre errors and hasn't crashed (so far). Could it be faster? Sure. Does it bother me? Not even the slightest. So many apps I use regularly run much slower than this.

This is the error that most web devs make. Their definition of fine is so low, that they can't comprehend reasoning why web tech is inferior on mobile.

Re: Transition to React Native

#123

Post by EvilEy3 »

intev wrote: post #109
EvilEy3 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Their CTO did no due diligence before making such an important transition. He certainly didn't do enough of it, right. They have traded long term prospects for short one. In the long run you'll have more issues with React Native than upsides. They cited issues with hiring native mobile devs, well now they've made it even harder for themselves. Since they need to find devs who know both native and React Native. And…

> He certainly didn't do enough of it, right. They have traded long term prospects for short one. This is extremely presumptuous to say the least. It assumes they didn't do enough and that you know more.

Presumptuous is to think that their decision is impeccable and that I don't know shit when you have no idea who I am and what I do.

Re: Transition to React Native

#124

Post by pixel_tracing »

babesh wrote: post #53

There are some long term trends that should work in React Native’s favor. The pace of mobile changes is slowing and will probably slow further. This is the usual case of an initial innovation transitioning to incremental improvements. This means that React will eventually catch up or come close to catching up with mobile developments (if they have enough technical expertise to do so). Competition has consolidated the…

You couldn’t be further from the truth. Mobile is undergoing a substantial evolution in development experience. SwiftUI and Compose are changing the development world for Mobile. The compiler itself is being optimized to show UI with hot reloading.

Re: Transition to React Native

#125

Post by EvilEy3 »

intev wrote: post #114
EvilEy3 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All your comments are so vicious with no backing. I literally listed my experience with the app. And I didn't even create account yet. > How does this even track? They had to retrain their engineers. To leverage Web developers, right. > I call complete BS with your app experience. I have a Redmi and the app works flawlessly. Which Redmi? I'm testing on Xiaomi Mi A1. It probably works better on my Samsung S10. But t…

> I literally listed my experience with the app. And I didn't even create account yet. That's not all you did. You implied they pay their employees very little, that they didn't do their research before making the switch and called the whole thing an "atrocity" which is heavy to the say the least. That's not an app review. >Which Redmi? I'm testing on Xiaomi Mi A1. It probably works better on my Samsung S10. But then…

> You implied they pay their employees very little

No implied. I stated it directly. Pay shit and get shit.

> that they didn't do their research before making the switch and called the whole thing an "atrocity" which is heavy to the say the least. That's not an app review.

I'm not an app reviewer, I'm a techie. And sorry that I didn't sugarcoat it enough for your sensitive ears.

> Most people in the US have something similar to a low budget phone from 2017? I find that extremely difficult to believe. India, probably. US/UK etc? Highly unlikely.

I'm sure Electron devs use the same reasoning when developing their stuff. After all, who has 8GB of RAM now?

> Yes that is their experience so far. They wrote about it and have data to believe it. You don't have either except random anecdotal data and visions about the future.

What data, again? "Internal metrics"? They provided literally zero data. The only thing they provided is improved startup on iOS and no data (sic!) from Android.

>Most of your claims don't have merit other than random anecdotal data which you are using to refuse their anecdotal data which is actually a lot less anecdotal that yours because they have many more developers and users.

I never said that my opinion is objective. If you can't handle critique, maybe you should quit online forums.

Re: Transition to React Native

#126

Post by EvilEy3 »

intev wrote: post #110
EvilEy3 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see shortage complaints from FAANG companies.

Are FAANG companies the median for tech salaries? If that's the case most companies are doomed. It's pretty common knowledge that FAANG pays really well. One of the big reasons people work there are for the extremely generous salaries. Everyone else is underpaying if you're comparing them to FAANG. Also by your definition, Apple and Amazon are notoriously cheap too. Really you're only comparing to Google, Facebook an…

> Are FAANG companies the median for tech salaries? If that's the case most companies are doomed.

FAANG salary is the median for good developer salary, yes. After all, why would you work for less if you're good enough?

> Everyone else is underpaying if you're comparing them to FAANG.

You're getting somewhere.

> Also by your definition, Apple and Amazon are notoriously cheap too.

Pretty sure they're paying bigger salary than coinbase does. At least their product is more interesting than crypto dashboard, maybe that's how they compensate for "shitty" pay.

Re: Transition to React Native

#127

Post by TheMagicHorsey »

I wonder if they considered Flutter. I joined a startup that’s using React Native and I have to say, I dislike all the complexity around state management, styling in separate CSS files, JSX syntax for components, etc.

I much prefer the unified approach of Flutter (everything is in Dart and not scattered in 3 different places) and batteries included component library.

Not to mention, if you have a small team, Google Cloud Firestone plus Flutter is a very productive and elegant way to launch an app with a small team ... or even solo.

Re: Transition to React Native

#128

Post by dstaley »

_fat_santa wrote: post #79
macando wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When Expo works like it should it's like the best dev experience ever. Supporting all React Native 3rd party components without ejecting and ditching the Expo app will be a huge step forward.

Expo is great for prototyping and small apps with limited scope. However anything bigger and expo just doesn’t work. At some point you will need to mess with the native side of thing, most of the time to initialize things like Firebase or adding a lib with a bridge. When you have to make native changes, no matter how small, Expo will get majorly in the way

Honestly I think you'd be surprised just how far the managed workflow can get you these days. That being said, Expo is aware of the limitations and is actively working on addressing those.[1]

[1] https://docs.expo.io/introduction/why-not-expo/

Re: Transition to React Native

#129

Post by Jare »

_fat_santa wrote: post #77
jfisk87 wrote: post #56

Long story short, terrible idea unless you're in a position like coinbase. The article is from a high level engineering standpoint about productivity and trying to be efficient. The thing the article doesn't mention is the best react native developer also is an expert in native mobile development. It is crazy hard finding these people. All techno fluff aside, any component mobile developer knows once you have a solid…

I highly disagree that an expert RN dev also needs to be an expert mobile dev. Articles like these make it seem that react native development requires native knowledge but that simply isn’t the case. With almost all greenfield RN apps, 99.9% of the code is RN and only very specific feature are helped out by native code.

You don't need to be an expert in native to write a RN app. However, you need to be very capable in native to have a responsive, performant, smooth RN app, and to keep it that way for years.

Large teams can afford to have a subset of platform devs and a large body of RN app devs to make this plan work (note: you now have 3 platforms: iOS, Android, and RN itself). Smaller teams will struggle. Most often, small teams will end up putting their weight on the RN side (develop new features!), and slowly slide downhill in performance, responsiveness and overall UX like the proverbial boiling frog.

Re: Transition to React Native

#130

Post by intev »

EvilEy3 wrote: post #123
intev wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> He certainly didn't do enough of it, right. They have traded long term prospects for short one. This is extremely presumptuous to say the least. It assumes they didn't do enough and that you know more.

Presumptuous is to think that their decision is impeccable and that I don't know shit when you have no idea who I am and what I do.

I never once said that their decision is impeccable. in fact I mentioned it probably has draw backs. What I did say was you don't have enough information about the decision making process and thoroughness. They cared enough to talk to the AirBnB devs which highlights how thorough they attempted to be.

> I don't know shit when you have no idea who I am and what I do.

Your words not mine. Re-read all of my responses without your blind hatred for what they did. All I am asking for is to give them the benefit of the doubt that they did their research and made a good decision. Of course it's clear you find that incomprehensible.

Post reply on HN