11–20 of 62 posts
* NPM
* It's still 0.59 or something and things are constantly breaking
* Because of that every piece of information older than 1 month should be distrusted
* App size
* It doesn't play well when you try to gradually replace or add RN screens to an existing application.
* There are multiple ways to do the same thing
* It adds another layer on top of the iOS and Android builds
* Javascript * NPM * It's still 0.59 or something and things are constantly breaking * Because of that every piece of information older than 1 month should be distrusted * App size * It doesn't play well when you try to gradually replace or add RN screens to an existing application. * There are multiple ways to do the same thing * It adds another layer on top of the iOS and Android builds
* NPM
* It's still 0.59 or something and things are constantly breaking
* Because of that every piece of information older than 1 month should be distrusted
* App size
* It doesn't play well when you try to gradually replace or add RN screens to an existing application.
* There are multiple ways to do the same thing
* It adds another layer on top of the iOS and Android builds
It would be tight if we could purge from the web all posts and threads related to unsupported and outdated ReactNative versions. It's actually quite interesting to see the almost in real-time development of ReactNative through the lens of hobbled and broke-ass solutions to problems associated with deprecated RN versions posted on StackOverflow or Medium.
This is actually a problem that could be solved by naming actually. Angular has a similar problem because if you search for an olde version of Angular you get 2.x and they're up to 7 now... I think at some point it makes sense to rename the project to avoid the cruft of the past when it really deserves it.
[1] https://facebook.github.io/react-native/blog/2017/03/13/intr...
[2] https://facebook.github.io/react-native/blog/2018/05/07/usin...
As a former iOS engineer, I for one really enjoy React Native. But I feel like it's focus is trying to maintain/supersede native development, where it's time and attention would be better served focusing on the efficiency of average developers on average tasks
React Native multiplies the complexity of a project so much that IMHO it completely negates its own usefulness.
From phonegap (before it became cordova), to Adobe Air with it's bad performance and "native extensions", to Appcelerator Titanium that put a nodejs server in your phone and even had Windows Phone 7 support, to cordova, to Haxe, to sencha and others. Appcelerator Titanium was the only ones that did real native for some cases like scrollviews, Haxe used custom C++ apis, the rest used webviews, and adobe air was basically flash emulated that ran like shit.
Write once deploy anywhere, meant write once, deploy somewhat anywhere, spend double the time to make that promise true. Kinda like having to do IE6 support in the past. I was deep in that madness up until mid-2014. At that point I decided to buy a macbook and give native development a try (obj-c for ios and java for android -- When I say native I mean real native and not React Native).
What a magical experience! Things that are tough to do in web even today, like real never-ending scroll lists, are a breeze in native with their reusable cells. Things like standard headers and modals, are already built in and a few lines away. And I actually prefer the touch event handlers on both ios and android to the web's "mouse/touch/PointerEvents" ones.
I do not understand why web developers have such a knee jerk reaction to native development. ObjectiveC/Swift and Java are actually easy to write. Tooling (especially for ios) is fantastic. In my experience, it is much faster to write UI interfaces in Objective C and Swift (I never use xcode's UI builder) than html+JS. But the real joy is being able to harness the real power of your phone. I run some C++ algorithms on both ios and android (I guess C/C++ is the original cross platform) that on android are faster than the built-in Java apis themselves! And of course, true multithreading!
But here we are, non-stop chasing the "no! I want javascript in my frontend, and in my servers, and javascript in my ios apps and android too!" dream.
Perhaps React Native accomplishes that. I hope it really does and solves that decade-long promise of "write once deploy anywhere". I guess all what I 'm trying to say is, don't be afraid of native people! Web devs are willing to go through insane hoops and loops instead of just... giving the real thing a go. So weird.
* Cryptic error messages. Out of maybe hundreds of errors/crashes I had while developing a medium sized app, only a few of them provided useful info about what/where happened.
* Lot's of outdated/abandonware/low-quality libs in the ecosystem. You really have to be careful when picking the dependencies.
* Fragile and complex builds. You'll have to use dependencies to make anything more than a basic app (unless you want to DIY), so get ready for some "fun" when upgrading the project because not all of the dependencies will be upgraded at the same time, might also often have the APK/IPA or development builds fail because of dependencies not properly installing or not playing nicely with one another.
* Lots of little stuff. For example, I had the ios simulator logs not work out of the box when launching with "react-native log-ios", so had to use a third-party solution for that. Metro bundler sometimes just breaks. I still have a problem of the app randomly closing down after some time on iOS, which I did not look deeply into yet but will have to solve before release. Constant issues with nesting scroll views on android. Hard to predict cross-platform inconsistencies in layout behaviour in some places. Can't name everything right now but they played on the nerves throughout the development.
I hope it gets better some day, but until then I'll probably look for alternatives for my next project as I wasn't very happy with RN.