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Java/Objc/Swift developer here, mobile. Most apps I work on, and projects I see, could benefit from React Native. The actually innovative ones, on the other h

Java/Objc/Swift developer here, mobile. Most apps I work on, and projects I see, could benefit from React Native. The actually innovative ones, on the other hand, could not. New view controllers continually being introduced by Apple and Google are not available in React Native. So if you want to get fancy with UX, you are out of luck. Or won't get a net benefit when you start doing native development to get around the limits of React Native. If your app just pulls lists of items from a server and displays them, with pull to refresh and infinite scrolling being the most innovative parts? You should probably use React Native at this point in time. Almost all of the "showcase" apps written in React Native (hosted on the Facebook page) aren't convincing showcases. Either because their UI is pretty bad / simple, or because they have only released on one platform. Townske is a pretty good example though.

vmarsy 10y ago
> New view controllers continually being introduced by Apple and Google are not available in React Native. So if you want to get fancy with UX, you are out of luck. Or won't get a net benefit when you start doing native development to get around the limits of React Native. It looks like this problem is acknowledged and addressed by the React Native folks[1] : React Native has several of the most critical platform components already wrapped, like ScrollView and TextInput, but not all of them, and certainly not ones you might have written yourself for a previous app. Fortunately, it's quite easy to wrap up these existing components for seamless integration with your React Native application. If your app has some innovative UI, but you can reuse most of the code from React Native for some basic parts of the app, wouldn't you benefit from using React Native? Or is [1] not that "quite easy" ? If you plan to have your app run on both iOS and Android (and Windows 10), what is the downside of React Native? I wonder how React Native stands vs. Cordova and Xamarin, performance wise and ease-of-use. I'm thinking it falls somewhere in between Cordova and Xamarin, but I'd love to hear people's experience on this. [1] https://facebook.github.io/react-native/docs/native-components-ios.html https://facebook.github.io/react-native/docs/native-componen...
htormey 10y ago
I think not having access to the latest platform feature is a little bit overstated for a number of reasons. 1) An example: It wasn't too long after iMessage apps came out in iOS 10 that tutorials emerged telling you how to use react native to build them, see: https://medium.com/rendez-voo/messages-app-app-extension-ios10-with-react-native-6d22ece64598 https://medium.com/rendez-voo/messages-app-app-extension-ios... 2) It's really not that difficult to wrap native components and expose them to react native, see: https://facebook.github.io/react-native/docs/communication-ios.html https://facebook.github.io/react-native/docs/communication-i... I would say that Android is a little bit more work right now, but it's really not that big of deal. 3) It's easy to embed react native in an existing iOS app. This is great for things like sign up screens, call to action pop ups or other Areas of the app where you want to iterate quickly. Also animations with react native are pretty nice. I haven't come across anything that I haven't been able to do yet. See: https://medium.com/react-native-training/react-native-animations-using-the-animated-api-ebe8e0669fae#.sw3wyao3g https://medium.com/react-native-training/react-native-animat... The biggest issue with react native is that its Javascript which a lot of native developers don't really like especially when compared to Swift.
- pvinis 10y ago
  I would love to develop an app in React Native using Swift instead of JavaScript. Using Swift, not only for the native modules, but really writing components in Swift. With props and renders and state and everything. Basically I want to use Swift but avoid IB, view controllers, and the whole cocoa rendering.

vmarsy 10y ago

> New view controllers continually being introduced by Apple and Google are not available in React Native. So if you want to get fancy with UX, you are out of luck. Or won't get a net benefit when you start doing native development to get around the limits of React Native. It looks like this problem is acknowledged and addressed by the React Native folks[1] : React Native has several of the most critical platform components already wrapped, like ScrollView and TextInput, but not all of them, and certainly not ones you might have written yourself for a previous app. Fortunately, it's quite easy to wrap up these existing components for seamless integration with your React Native application. If your app has some innovative UI, but you can reuse most of the code from React Native for some basic parts of the app, wouldn't you benefit from using React Native? Or is [1] not that "quite easy" ? If you plan to have your app run on both iOS and Android (and Windows 10), what is the downside of React Native? I wonder how React Native stands vs. Cordova and Xamarin, performance wise and ease-of-use. I'm thinking it falls somewhere in between Cordova and Xamarin, but I'd love to hear people's experience on this. [1] https://facebook.github.io/react-native/docs/native-components-ios.html https://facebook.github.io/react-native/docs/native-componen...

htormey 10y ago

I think not having access to the latest platform feature is a little bit overstated for a number of reasons. 1) An example: It wasn't too long after iMessage apps came out in iOS 10 that tutorials emerged telling you how to use react native to build them, see: https://medium.com/rendez-voo/messages-app-app-extension-ios10-with-react-native-6d22ece64598 https://medium.com/rendez-voo/messages-app-app-extension-ios... 2) It's really not that difficult to wrap native components and expose them to react native, see: https://facebook.github.io/react-native/docs/communication-ios.html https://facebook.github.io/react-native/docs/communication-i... I would say that Android is a little bit more work right now, but it's really not that big of deal. 3) It's easy to embed react native in an existing iOS app. This is great for things like sign up screens, call to action pop ups or other Areas of the app where you want to iterate quickly. Also animations with react native are pretty nice. I haven't come across anything that I haven't been able to do yet. See: https://medium.com/react-native-training/react-native-animations-using-the-animated-api-ebe8e0669fae#.sw3wyao3g https://medium.com/react-native-training/react-native-animat... The biggest issue with react native is that its Javascript which a lot of native developers don't really like especially when compared to Swift.

pvinis 10y ago
I would love to develop an app in React Native using Swift instead of JavaScript. Using Swift, not only for the native modules, but really writing components in Swift. With props and renders and state and everything. Basically I want to use Swift but avoid IB, view controllers, and the whole cocoa rendering.