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

What do you dislike about React Native?

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 62 posts

Re: What do you dislike about React Native?

#31

Post by devwastaken »

SneakerXZ wrote: post #29
rolleiflex wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone intrinsically understands that native is better, and I'm saying this as somebody who runs a 120k LoC Electron app ( https://getaether.net ) myself. I'm painfully aware that native is better, all day, every day. The problem is this: I'm a solo founder. I am both the engineer and designer (and PM). The alternative for me would be not to write a Mac app, a Windows app, and a Linux app separately, and have them…

But why Electron? There are other cross-platform solutions with great performance.

There are no equivalents to electron. You either use a browser, or you get stuck in someone else's lacking UI, like qt. Electron just works, and that's why it's everywhere.

Re: What do you dislike about React Native?

#32

Post by pkroll »

mchannon wrote: post #15
brink wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How dare they do something good for the community

There are many who would call unleashing React Native on the ecosystem anything but. In fact I went to the trouble of writing a whole website on the subject: www.xn--ls8h.st.

By whole website, you mean of course, you bought a domain and put ONE PAGE up. And "there are many" flat earthers: is there a meaningful number of people who would say Facebook releasing React Native is a net negative for the community?

Re: What do you dislike about React Native?

#33

Post by JofArnold »

pauliusj wrote: post #20

For me it feels like RN is still not ready for an enjoyable development experience (it feels more around alpha/beta version), which maybe it is because the version is 0.57 or somewhere around that. The main problems I have with RN are: * 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…

This is a good and fair summary. It is a frustrating developer experience for sure - especially Android.

Re: What do you dislike about React Native?

#34

Post by IloveHN84 »

devwastaken wrote: post #31
SneakerXZ wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But why Electron? There are other cross-platform solutions with great performance.

There are no equivalents to electron. You either use a browser, or you get stuck in someone else's lacking UI, like qt. Electron just works, and that's why it's everywhere.

Qt actually performs better than Electron and works everywhere and

Re: What do you dislike about React Native?

#35

Post by darpa_escapee »

pier25 wrote: post #24

I tried RN in early 2016 but Android support and documentation were not great. Honestly, I've always thought that RN (and similar approaches) is kinda a hack. Yes, it solves a problem of reducing developer time across platforms, but it introduces other more obscure problems. A JavaScript engine with it's own set of problems giving orders through some bridge to the native part... I don't know, it's a lot of moving pie…

I got a similar impression from ReactNative: it felt like a hack, and the hack came apart at the seams if you tried to debug it.

Similarly, Flutter felt much more like a cohesive solution compared to RN.

Re: What do you dislike about React Native?

#36

Post by atosatto »

pauliusj wrote: post #20

For me it feels like RN is still not ready for an enjoyable development experience (it feels more around alpha/beta version), which maybe it is because the version is 0.57 or somewhere around that. The main problems I have with RN are: * 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…

We had the same bug about random crashes in production and surprisingly we found that the problem was caused by console logging. There's a babel plugin that can help to remove console logging only in production, something like remove-console-log

Re: What do you dislike about React Native?

#37

Post by grasshopper2218 »

throwaway66666 wrote: post #19

I will probably be heavily downvoted but here goes nothing. I have not used React Native yet, but I followed and was heavily invested in the "write once deploy anywhere" trend between 2009 - 2014. 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…

>I will probably be heavily downvoted but here goes nothing.

>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.

And the weirder thing is the expectation of getting downvoted when expressing anything that dares to question the accepted religion. Despite making a polite and well presented argument, embedded in real experience. It's a shame.

It's almost like javascript developers prefer diversifying over 100 different frameworks than diversifying 1-2 different languages. All of this while Swift and Kotlin are very close to javascript. The learning curve is way easier than going from Angular to React.

Re: What do you dislike about React Native?

#38

Post by grasshopper2218 »

nathan_f77 wrote: post #30
throwaway66666 wrote: post #19

I will probably be heavily downvoted but here goes nothing. I have not used React Native yet, but I followed and was heavily invested in the "write once deploy anywhere" trend between 2009 - 2014. 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…

I agree with most of the things you've said. But here's the thing: Even if you are able to write native apps in Objective C, Swift, and Java, React Native still saves you an enormous amount of time. And you don't have to do everything in JavaScript. I'm a web developer who got into native iOS development, and then I built an app with React Native. I was blown away by how much easier it is to build a cross-platform iO…

I don't think it saves as much time as it's often touted to. I've found the OP's point that you spend double the time to make the write once promise true more of a factor. I believe that what everyone is seeing currently is very small deposits of code being used in new apps. Wait until those apps become 3,4,5 years old and the strain of feature creep will start to show just like it always does in software.

I think the main advantage is the flexibility of it. Just like you said that you "love building the UI with React", then go for it. Personally I love Xcode and Android Studio. The ability to run the app right out of the box, and the performance measuring tools, especially when it comes to threading, are unmatched to what is offered in Chrome. Whatever suits a developer's passion and skill, to enable them to build with a CHOICE of languages and tools, that's the main benefit of React Native. It also introduces a bunch of web developers into Kotlin and Swift, and they might get a taste of it being not as intimidating as they think it is.

Re: What do you dislike about React Native?

#40

Post by fitpolar »

reverite wrote: post #27

A few friends and I have noticed that applications that are using React Native, even in the best of situations in optimizing, it still drains battery life faster (sometimes far faster) than something written in Java/Kotlin or ObjC/Swift.

Do you have any examples of that, and how do you determine which apps are built with RN?

I've noticed a similar thing, but have nothing to go on but my gut instinct. For instance, I'm pretty sure that the food ordering app Ritual is using RN, it just doesn't feel quite native.

Post reply on HN