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React Native made me give up a project today

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Re: React Native made me give up a project today

#61

Post by WA »

SwiftyBug wrote: post #56
solardev wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you get these on the app stores yet?

I'm currently building a React Native app and I was wondering how much easier would it be to create a PWA that would live in a WebView inside a native app just so I could publish it in the App Store.

It’s very easy. Take your app, dump it into Capacitor. Done.

If you revisit your Capacitor-wrapper a few years later, you either take the update-dependencies-route or just start a fresh project and dump your PWA bundle in there.

Depends on how many native APIs you are using, such as in app purchases.

Re: React Native made me give up a project today

#62

Post by iKlsR »

The best investment I ever made and you could too probably is to setup some ci step and dependabot etc. That's how I constantly monitor my many web, mobile and desktop projects and keep my dependencies update. If a new version of a dependency or framework like say flutter drops, I set aside some time, make a new branch, upgrade and do the same. I practice the same with feature branches, merge as soon as possible so the rebases and merges don't get hairy in a week or two. It's maintenance work but the couple minutes a week or so end up paying off in the long term.

Re: React Native made me give up a project today

#63

Post by Sysctl232 »

bsnnkv wrote: post #3

I've unfortunately had this experience many times in the Javascript ecosystem as a whole. 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…

Maybe this is true when you have an Angular js 1.0 project on Node.js and want to update to Angular 15. But that's not because of Node.js. I manage a ton of older Node.js projects and there is little to no friction.

Re: React Native made me give up a project today

#64

Post by knewter »

nine_k wrote: post #39
taeric wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorta? You can claim it is the fault of Apple, but as it is literally the problem that RN is trying to solve, it is very much their problem.

Who solves this problem any better in the cross-platform GUI space? Well, maybe Qt, but even if it does, C++ is much less forgiving than TS.

Flutter

Re: React Native made me give up a project today

#65

Post by cyberprunes »

api wrote: post #9

React Native is one of those things I instinctively avoided, not because it's bad but because it's a big ball of crap. Anything with that many dependencies and long install processes and such is going to be extremely brittle and hard to maintain.

I would say that a big ball of crap qualifies as bad.

Re: React Native made me give up a project today

#66

Post by kbrannigan »

ncallaway wrote: post #40
rockyj wrote: post #26

Ruby, Cocoapods, Homebrew are not React Native problems, they are Apple problems. They ship an OS without a development friendly package management system. Their entire toolchain has no way to manage libs/packages which led to the creation of Homebrew + Cocoapods. Apple also does not allow iOS development on other OS where package management is much better. Apple now also has added the extra complexity of a new CPU a…

I was going to say, the same is true of every cross platform framework I’ve ever used. Coming back after some time away is usually 5 minutes of updating things to get Android working, and then a few hours of iOS dependency hell. It’s definitely an issue with RN, but I haven’t used a cross platform framework that’s any better in this regard.

I only thought it was web dev that had deployment/ installation difficulties.

So the problem is setting up and app either for development or deployment is annoying in general.

Re: React Native made me give up a project today

#67

Post by marstall »

rn setup can be hard - but consider the problem space - two different operating systems, two different build systems. if 1 day is the max you're willing to put in to investigate build/config errors, there are very few dev environments you're going to succeed in.

Take, for example, native iOS development. For any dev, that involves regular bouts of multi-day configuration hell. Xcode is a huge beast and cryptic for beginners. Add in multiple third party libraries like firebase and it's a tossup which is harder, native or RN.

Toss in Android support, which is the main reason to use RN, and then you will see an order of magnitude improvement in your RN config.

Toss in web support, which RN has, and you're in a deeper hell.

Re: React Native made me give up a project today

#68

Post by amateurInAll »

otikik wrote: post #20

> React Native is great; React Native firebase is great; Firebase is great; Apple is great. Forgive me for saying this, but the fact that you started with that line makes it sound like you might have some Stockholm Syndrome (or perhaps Sunk Cost Fallacy is more appropriate here). Because what you wrote afterwards makes it clear that at least some of the parts that you mentioned afterwards are in fact not great.

Maybe - I just want to be clear that in all of these camps I see great contributions from surely very talented teams.

So it isn't a rant about any one actor being bad. But somehow, getting it all to work together is not just difficult, it seems like with time it's getting more difficult.

Re: React Native made me give up a project today

#69

Post by amateurInAll »

kitsunesoba wrote: post #7

This is one of the reasons that as a one person mobile team, I’ve avoided anything but native mobile toolkits. It’s a little more work in some ways that way, but if I have to set one platform down for a while to focus on the other, picking it back up isn’t ever a problem, and if I run into issues usually others have too and they’re easy to fix. Even the mess that are native Android projects are usually reasonable to…

Thanks for sharing this. I think you nailed it: the promise of RN is very appealing to the one person mobile team but ends up being more challenging in the end.
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