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Comment by cageface | Hacker News Reader

The React Native team has been doing phenomenal work and having just finished my first React Native app it's definitely the first kit I'd reach for if I needed to write a cross platform app.

However, I'm still not convinced that it makes sense to use a cross platform toolkit if the app is your primary product. If you just need some kind of mobile support for an existing business or service then React Native is a smart choice. But if the app is your bread & butter I think there are still too many drawbacks to working at an abstraction so far removed from the core native APIs.

And as much as JS has improved recently I'd still prefer to work in Swift or Java (or Kotlin) if I have the option.

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I've tried a couple cross platform frameworks (mostly Xamarin and PhoneGap/Cordova) and am aware of some challenges there.

To me, Xamarin is like programming for each platform, just in C# and with another layer of bugs (and weirdness, I would say, and don't even mention Xamarin Forms). Of course, you get the possibility to share BL in a common layer, but pay for it in terms of instability and complexity to get stuff working native-like. Good for trivial GUI, BL-heavy apps I guess, but not for complex GUI, little shared BL apps.

PhoneGap/Cordova has some serious complications when it comes to predictable rendering due to the plethora of possible rendering engines you may encounter. Any non-trivial layout/styling can be completely messed up on different platforms, or even different versions of the same platform. Also it can be a challenge to achieve native performance and feel.

How would you say React Native compares?

It seems it could be more able to adapt to the platform compared to PhoneGap/Cordova, and easier (perhaps) to work with than Xamarin.

I'm considering using it in an upcoming project where both Android and iOS are required, and given my lack of iOS-experience, it seems like a good alternative.

I did a React Native iOS project last summer, and you should be aware that you do need to write a lot of native code to do non trivial things. Think of React Native as more of a view layer than a whole framework, and realize that JS is simply too slow to do things involving realtime reactions to sensor data (including touch) or images, sound or video.

There is some traction with being able to use Swift for android development. Then why bother with xamarin at that point :)

Port to android in swift code base: https://github.com/apple/swift/pull/1442

I like React and React Native, but the latter hits me as not being the best choice form mobile development, especially for a small team: imagine you are developing an app for Android and iOS in React Native, you got your Android developer and your iOS developer learn React, they start implementing, they stumble upon a roadblock and need to dive deeper in the platform to solve; it's alright they were doing Native before, they can handle it, but soon, as they need to focus on being more experienced in React, they might feel less comfortable with evolving best practices in the underlying platform. Now you need to keep up to date in the native platform and in React.

I wish react native the best and I am going to use it some times (it has lots of perfect use cases in simpler apps, in my opinion), but for more involved projects, I would still choose Java/Swift (and how about a react style framework in the native frameworks?) :)

I'm also interested in applying React's declarative model of UI building to native environments. I guess I should spend more time with ReactiveCocoa, RXJava etc.

Facebook released this just before React Native:

http://componentkit.org

UWP has XAML which is native and declarative. It's what the Windows version of React Native targets.

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