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What do you dislike about React Native?

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Re: What do you dislike about React Native?

#41

Post by throwaway66666 »

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.

I agree with you that on desktop the situation is a bit different. I 've only played around with UI on OSX, and for some reason it is way harder than native ui on ios (old NextStep api vs UI api). Fonts are handled differently. The coordinate system is different (starting from the bottom left corner if I remember correctly). Coding for multiple screens; like tracking pointer position on windows on different screens is awkward. Lots and lots of legacy stuff.

Perhaps windows is better? What about linux? :p But I see why people are disliking the native ui situation on desktop.

Re: What do you dislike about React Native?

#42

Post by holografix »

JoeCortopassi wrote: post #16

Companies and teams don’t usually pick non-native solutions because they're better tech. Non-native solutions are picked so that teams can be more efficient with their time/resources. For some teams, that means delivering an app cheaper. For other teams, that means being able to spread resources thinner and stretch budgets. This doesn't have to be a bad thing per se, it's just a business decision. As a former iOS eng…

Great insight. How can we use something similar to Interface Builder to create React Native apps?

Re: What do you dislike about React Native?

#43

Post by mchannon »

pkroll wrote: post #32
mchannon wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Is that an honest question? Take a look at the dozens of posts in the parent article and tell me the quantity isn’t meaningful.

Re: What do you dislike about React Native?

#44

Post by paulie_a »

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.

I took a look at a large list of apps that uses electron. I found three that would actually have significant user bases. It might be used everywhere, just no one is using the result.

Re: What do you dislike about React Native?

#45

Post by taurath »

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…

If it were just 3 platforms (android iOS and browser) then it would be less of an issue - when you have to support 12+ platforms such as TVs, keep an always evolving design language up to date on all those platforms, making a change requires 12x the work.

Re: What do you dislike about React Native?

#46

Post by d0m »

IloveHN84 wrote: post #34
devwastaken wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

What you want is cross-platform:

  - Web (IE, Safari, Firefox, Chrome, and older versions of those browsers)
  - Web responsive (When you access it from small screens or access the web from your phone's browser)
  - Android (old devices to recent ones)
  - iOS (old devices to recent ones)
  - And, eventually, get to a desktop app, ideally on windows, mac and linux.
Say you're the tech lead and you need to make a decision about the stack to support all these platforms, and you're a team of 2-3 devs, yourself included. What stack do you pick?

Re: What do you dislike about React Native?

#47

Post by timofei7 »

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…

it's worth reading up on what react-native is. it isn't "write once deploy anywhere," but rather "learn once, write anywhere." in essence it allows us to enjoy the fairly transformative one way state driven view paradigm (think functional) to write apps. that is the magical part of it - the one language multiple platforms aspect is a tertiary consideration in my opinion. the pleasure comes from an environment where code changes are almost immediately visable without a lengthy compile/run step, and the pure joy of having views that depend purely on state input without the mess of side effects.

someday everyone will realize that one-way data binding is beautiful and that functional paradigms can save hours/days/weeks of testing and messiness. react-native is just bringing that beauty to the dev process now. i've done obj-c/swift xcode, and maybe i'm not good at it, but it ends up not being easy to read, and not fun waiting every time i want to test something for it to compile and run.

under the hood react-native does something very clever, it isn't a hack or ugly, but rather quite lovely. you get the pleasure of seeing your components and data flow as a tree, a tree that only updates nodes as necessary when state changes, and where each component is a fully fledged native component with all the functionality and speed of the native component. want a UIScrollView? sure ``. data is passed through easily and it is all very easy to reason about. that is the goal right? code that is easy to read and makes sense.

Re: What do you dislike about React Native?

#48

Post by Izkata »

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 do not understand why web developers have such a knee jerk reaction to native development.

So this is a one-off anecdote, but my experience with my teammates at work is that it's not so much an objection to native development, but an objection to having to learn more. Over half took a bootcamp-style class for web development after having never done any programming before, and managed to get hired. Their current status:

* One has kept on learning, and I see no issues with them doing native development if they ever encountered it; they have the right mindset to teach themselves.

* One has been on the team nearly as long as the first, but seems to be stuck in a rut. They've not progressed very far on their own and have to be handheld much of the way. This is a person I would expect to object to native development and push for using a framework like React Native, just so they don't have to go out and learn another language, expecting it to be too difficult (because of their inexperience with anything other than javascript and React).

* The others joined too recently to be sure yet, but I have an inkling one of them is going to be more like the first, just much slower at it.

I have the unnerving feeling that at least some of these web development bootcamps are presenting themselves as "learn this and you're good to for the rest of your life", with too many jumping in because it pays well right now, and not realizing they will have to keep on learning.

Re: What do you dislike about React Native?

#49

Post by langitbiru »

IloveHN84 wrote: post #34
devwastaken wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Seconded this. The downside is you have to use C++ to beat Javascript performance. You can use Python of course but it is kinda slow.

Re: What do you dislike about React Native?

#50

Post by fitpolar »

d0m wrote: post #46
IloveHN84 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Qt actually performs better than Electron and works everywhere and

What you want is cross-platform: - Web (IE, Safari, Firefox, Chrome, and older versions of those browsers) - Web responsive (When you access it from small screens or access the web from your phone's browser) - Android (old devices to recent ones) - iOS (old devices to recent ones) - And, eventually, get to a desktop app, ideally on windows, mac and linux. Say you're the tech lead and you need to make a decision about…

The fact is, only very rarely are you in a team of 2-3 devs and you need to support ALL of these platforms. If that’s the case for a small startup, serious strategic errors and lack of focus is being made by the founders!

Even Instagram didn’t even have an Android app until they were acquired, and then it still took them another couple of years to support web. Their focus was their success.

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