Tempted to Abandon React Native for Native Android
kelvinpompey.me
Tempted to Abandon React Native for Native Android
1–10 of 63 posts
Re: Tempted to Abandon React Native for Native Android
#2Sounds like a good opportunity to build some performance-tuning muscle :)
Whether using RN or java, you'll want to know how to debug memory/performance issues on Android - they're mostly unavoidable on mobile devices!
(And maybe you can file some issues against React Native, too, which would be great and help the platform)
Re: Tempted to Abandon React Native for Native Android
#3Sounds like a good opportunity to build some performance-tuning muscle :) Whether using RN or java, you'll want to know how to debug memory/performance issues on Android - they're mostly unavoidable on mobile devices! (And maybe you can file some issues against React Native, too, which would be great and help the platform)
That's a fair point about the opportunity to build some performance-tuning muscle but I imagine to do that would require solid knowledge of both React and Android. Where do I start? I am more inclined to go towards the native Android side first.
Aa a follow up, I just did a test with a native Android app doing the same thing: getting an image through an Intent. With the native Android app, the same image that was crashing the React Native app doesn't cause any problems.
Re: Tempted to Abandon React Native for Native Android
#4My next foray into mobile is going to be with this-
Digging through the api it just looks much more capable in directly calling android instead of abstracted cross platform blobs.
Re: Tempted to Abandon React Native for Native Android
#5My next foray into mobile is going to be with this- https://www.nativescript.org/ Digging through the api it just looks much more capable in directly calling android instead of abstracted cross platform blobs.
I'm liking the idea of NativeScript as well, though when doing large image work (or audio or video work), you might still want to drop into native code in a plugin.
So that, for instance, you can be sure exactly when the resources for an image have been deallocated.
Re: Tempted to Abandon React Native for Native Android
#6Sounds like a good opportunity to build some performance-tuning muscle :) Whether using RN or java, you'll want to know how to debug memory/performance issues on Android - they're mostly unavoidable on mobile devices! (And maybe you can file some issues against React Native, too, which would be great and help the platform)
I've seen large images give native iOS and Android apps trouble. It's a challenging problem to solve no matter what.
And using ReactNative or NativeScript for the high level UI and a plug-in to handle pushing the bits around is probably still a better choice than going completely native.
Re: Tempted to Abandon React Native for Native Android
#7My next foray into mobile is going to be with this- https://www.nativescript.org/ Digging through the api it just looks much more capable in directly calling android instead of abstracted cross platform blobs.
I've dabbled with NativeScript a bit. It does seem a bit closer to the underlying platform but from my experience of it, it felt incomplete.
I first tried the Angular version before the final version of Angular was released and I recall occasions where the documentation for NativeScript was behind the actual API. I had to look at the actual code samples to figure out the correct APIs.
The next time I looked at it, I tried the regular JavaScript version and I recall having trouble deciphering the API for the SideBar plugin.
This left me feeling a bit insecure about the product. It looks to have a lot of potential though but it could use a bit more polish and better documentation.
Re: Tempted to Abandon React Native for Native Android
#8My next foray into mobile is going to be with this- https://www.nativescript.org/ Digging through the api it just looks much more capable in directly calling android instead of abstracted cross platform blobs.
For the types of problems the author is describing, NativeScript would not be there to support you. NativeScript surfaces the device API's across the JS bridge, and the serialization across this bridge and pressure on it will always lead to less performant code. You would have to drop to native modules all the same, and then what have you solved?
Re: Tempted to Abandon React Native for Native Android
#9Sounds like a good opportunity to build some performance-tuning muscle :) Whether using RN or java, you'll want to know how to debug memory/performance issues on Android - they're mostly unavoidable on mobile devices! (And maybe you can file some issues against React Native, too, which would be great and help the platform)
I've seen large images give native iOS and Android apps trouble. It's a challenging problem to solve no matter what. And using ReactNative or NativeScript for the high level UI and a plug-in to handle pushing the bits around is probably still a better choice than going completely native.
That's an interesting idea. The code to select and resize the images are native third-party plugins so in this case I am not sure anything more could be done.
I thought maybe the problem was that the app had to switch to another app to select the image. I reimplemented the code using a pure JavaScript plugin based on React Native's CameraRoll API to avoid switching apps and it still crashed when the image was selected for processing.
Re: Tempted to Abandon React Native for Native Android
#10Sounds like a good opportunity to build some performance-tuning muscle :) Whether using RN or java, you'll want to know how to debug memory/performance issues on Android - they're mostly unavoidable on mobile devices! (And maybe you can file some issues against React Native, too, which would be great and help the platform)
That's a fair point about the opportunity to build some performance-tuning muscle but I imagine to do that would require solid knowledge of both React and Android. Where do I start? I am more inclined to go towards the native Android side first. Aa a follow up, I just did a test with a native Android app doing the same thing: getting an image through an Intent. With the native Android app, the same image that was cra…
What does that have to do with performance? You shouldn't serialize hi-rez bitmap and pack it in Intent.
Activities/Intents should at least force you to be careful and not to keep all data around in your memory, but only pass data you really need.