React Native made me give up a project today

React Native is great; React Native firebase is great; Firebase is great; Apple is great.

Getting an app published that depends on all these to work together is an absolute nightmare.

Just installing it is now a walk through a minefield of errors - is your mac an M1? There are dozens of different recipes to follow for a maddening mix of how to install different versions of ruby, of cocoapods, with homebrew or not, with the arm terminal or rosetta emulator.

Maybe I was naive to expect that after a couple of years things would have just gotten easier or faster.

After a day spent 99% on just setup and getting a generic app to not break, before even touching a line of code to make a feature, I have quit.

I wonder if others feel this way? I'm sad because I like app development, and the idea of building for multiple platforms. And I previously invested a lot in learning and supporting RN but the balkanization of this platform has reached the tipping point for me.

I recently started writing about going back to a Rust project (check my submissions if you're interested) after 2 years and the experience couldn't be more different (incredibly positive, can't say enough good things).

I would love to develop more for mobile platforms, but I just don't think the cost to my mental state is worth it. I actually ended up killing two mobile apps for my main solo project and replacing them with iOS shortcuts and a Discord bot which thankfully provide 99% of the same functionality that the apps previously did.

I know it's not possible for every use case, but if your mobile app is primarily used to send API requests with payloads of text/images/videos, you'd be surprised how far you can get just using iOS shortcuts these days.

Upgrading versions or dependencies isn’t a nightmare.

Dart is easy to use and a pretty good language.

Lots of community support and dependencies.

It works.

Cocoapods in particular is a huge pain in the ass though, even on native iOS projects. It’s been blissful to drop it in favor of Xcode’s built in Swift Package Manager.

As an aside, I’ve found it similarly frustrating to try to get old Rails projects running again. Found one that I hadn’t worked on in at least a decade, would be neat to see it booted up again right? Haha nope forget it, isn’t happening.