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Using React Native: One Year Later

127 points by sotojuan 10y ago

jsnk 10y ago
I love Discord and I think it'll seriously challenge a lot of communications tools out in the market. Discord won't just stop at communication for gaming. It can be a general purpose communication tool.
- sotojuan 10y ago
  The React community uses it for all their discussions (ranging from React core to the various libraries in the ecosystem) and it works great and is very fast. Even their Electron desktop app performs very well!
  - tlrobinson 10y ago
    Is there still no way to mark channels as favorites or otherwise organize/hide channels? I can't stand using the reactiflux Discord for this reason.
    - b1naryth1ef 10y ago
      The best way to do this right now is to "mute" channels by clicking the bell icon on the right of the channel header (or opening the server notification settings, or right-clicking the channel name). You can then easily hide all muted channels, providing a good way to get a condensed or filtered view of large servers.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    - sotojuan 10y ago
      At the end of the day Discord is a chat for gamers and gaming so features like that and searchable history aren't implemented yet because they're not things gamers usually use. They'll come eventually though.
distances 10y ago
> We tried to run the app on Android too when React Native for Android came out, but unfortunately encountered some performance issues and decided to hold off. Is this still the case for Android? I've been thinking of trying out React Native, but for me Android would be the main platform and iOS a bonus that may or may not be used.
- Vishnevskiy 10y ago
  We haven't tried in months so I can't give a scientific answer but our assessment early on was more that due to the diversity of Android devices. The low end ones that are for sale even now won't perform well enough for our use case.
  - davidpelaez 10y ago
    Did your case have some things that make it heavy in some way? e.g. very long list with many images, data structures that were big and kept in memory? Video or heavy animations? Or not really and the whole thing was just slow?
    - Vishnevskiy 10y ago
      We ran the exact same code (minus the Chat view) that we have on iOS which performs really well. It performed poorly on Android devices we care about. Touch events would lag (because of the JS computations hey resulted in), animations would be choppy (Android has native Animated.js now though, we haven't tried it). Our conclusion was since we already had a pretty good native Android app it was probably not investing time in a degraded experience. We will maybe try again in the future but the gut feeling is JS performance on many slow cores (Android devices love this) is obviously not as good as two fast cores (iOS devices).
      - lacker 10y ago
        The performance of the native Animated class is much better than handling animations in JS - definitely give that a try if you're trying RN again. I'm curious about touch events - what JS computations were happening on touch events, was it complex and app-specific or was it something relatively standard?
rmason 10y ago
Keep an eye on Alibaba's Weex, especially if you like VueJS: http://alibaba.github.io/weex/ http://alibaba.github.io/weex/
- pdxandi 10y ago
  I've been using VueJS for a few months and am a big fan. Can you elaborate on why Weex would be attractive to VueJS users? I couldn't find much documentation on it.
  - oplav 10y ago
    I've never used Weex (or React Native) but it looks like Weex uses VueJS syntax to render components [1], just like React Native uses React syntax. [1]: https://github.com/vuejs/vue/issues/2119 https://github.com/vuejs/vue/issues/2119
yawn 10y ago
"Apple has recently allowed you to update the app over the air using JavaScriptCore without going through the App Store review process again." What does this mean? Can someone elaborate on this?
- kreutz 10y ago
  You can push updates OTA for your app. i.e. https://microsoft.github.io/code-push/ https://microsoft.github.io/code-push/
brentvatne 10y ago
The Discord iOS app is fantastic! It's a great example of dropping down from JS to native to implement features that aren't yet possible with just JS (in this case, smooth animations while simultaneously doing work in JS and a chat view). Related to this: I recently did a talk about building an Android app with React Native in pure JS at ReactEurope in Paris, and discussed the main issues that we had encountered -- people interested in this article might also enjoy the talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cI9bDvDEsYE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cI9bDvDEsYE
hharnisch 10y ago
"Flexbox’s style code is about half as long and far easier to understand than the code of Auto Layout." Hell yes! Is this a rough estimate or did you compare implementations in each?
mamcx 10y ago
A way to use React but without JS, like with swift?

127 points by sotojuan 10y ago

jsnk 10y ago

I love Discord and I think it'll seriously challenge a lot of communications tools out in the market. Discord won't just stop at communication for gaming. It can be a general purpose communication tool.

sotojuan 10y ago
The React community uses it for all their discussions (ranging from React core to the various libraries in the ecosystem) and it works great and is very fast. Even their Electron desktop app performs very well!
- tlrobinson 10y ago
  Is there still no way to mark channels as favorites or otherwise organize/hide channels? I can't stand using the reactiflux Discord for this reason.
  - b1naryth1ef 10y ago
    The best way to do this right now is to "mute" channels by clicking the bell icon on the right of the channel header (or opening the server notification settings, or right-clicking the channel name). You can then easily hide all muted channels, providing a good way to get a condensed or filtered view of large servers.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - sotojuan 10y ago
    At the end of the day Discord is a chat for gamers and gaming so features like that and searchable history aren't implemented yet because they're not things gamers usually use. They'll come eventually though.

distances 10y ago

> We tried to run the app on Android too when React Native for Android came out, but unfortunately encountered some performance issues and decided to hold off. Is this still the case for Android? I've been thinking of trying out React Native, but for me Android would be the main platform and iOS a bonus that may or may not be used.

Vishnevskiy 10y ago
We haven't tried in months so I can't give a scientific answer but our assessment early on was more that due to the diversity of Android devices. The low end ones that are for sale even now won't perform well enough for our use case.
- davidpelaez 10y ago
  Did your case have some things that make it heavy in some way? e.g. very long list with many images, data structures that were big and kept in memory? Video or heavy animations? Or not really and the whole thing was just slow?
  - Vishnevskiy 10y ago
    We ran the exact same code (minus the Chat view) that we have on iOS which performs really well. It performed poorly on Android devices we care about. Touch events would lag (because of the JS computations hey resulted in), animations would be choppy (Android has native Animated.js now though, we haven't tried it). Our conclusion was since we already had a pretty good native Android app it was probably not investing time in a degraded experience. We will maybe try again in the future but the gut feeling is JS performance on many slow cores (Android devices love this) is obviously not as good as two fast cores (iOS devices).
    - lacker 10y ago
      The performance of the native Animated class is much better than handling animations in JS - definitely give that a try if you're trying RN again. I'm curious about touch events - what JS computations were happening on touch events, was it complex and app-specific or was it something relatively standard?

rmason 10y ago

Keep an eye on Alibaba's Weex, especially if you like VueJS: http://alibaba.github.io/weex/ http://alibaba.github.io/weex/

pdxandi 10y ago
I've been using VueJS for a few months and am a big fan. Can you elaborate on why Weex would be attractive to VueJS users? I couldn't find much documentation on it.
- oplav 10y ago
  I've never used Weex (or React Native) but it looks like Weex uses VueJS syntax to render components [1], just like React Native uses React syntax. [1]: https://github.com/vuejs/vue/issues/2119 https://github.com/vuejs/vue/issues/2119

yawn 10y ago

"Apple has recently allowed you to update the app over the air using JavaScriptCore without going through the App Store review process again." What does this mean? Can someone elaborate on this?

kreutz 10y ago
You can push updates OTA for your app. i.e. https://microsoft.github.io/code-push/ https://microsoft.github.io/code-push/

brentvatne 10y ago

The Discord iOS app is fantastic! It's a great example of dropping down from JS to native to implement features that aren't yet possible with just JS (in this case, smooth animations while simultaneously doing work in JS and a chat view). Related to this: I recently did a talk about building an Android app with React Native in pure JS at ReactEurope in Paris, and discussed the main issues that we had encountered -- people interested in this article might also enjoy the talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cI9bDvDEsYE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cI9bDvDEsYE

hharnisch 10y ago

"Flexbox’s style code is about half as long and far easier to understand than the code of Auto Layout." Hell yes! Is this a rough estimate or did you compare implementations in each?

mamcx 10y ago

A way to use React but without JS, like with swift?