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Comment by kyriakos | Hacker News Reader

Stupid question: anyone using React Native on Android in production (other than Facebook that is)?

Would you recommend using React Native instead of developing Android apps the traditional way if I don't already have experience with Android development?

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I recently made a game (now in both App stores) with React Native

http://complexview.com/apps/rgb-logic/index.html

I code in both Swift and Java (and a little Kotlin) but I think RN was better for this project:

* Cross platform with very little extra effort (it only took a couple of hours to take iOS version, make quite a few improvements to both versions and a few changes for Android and ship it).

* The game relies on a somewhat complex UI with simple updates... React/Javascript makes this kind of thing a lot easier to code than say using some kind of complex custom state/view objects in Java.

* Adding a tutorial was way easier thanks to Javascript's blurring of code and data

* Live reload (and now hot reload!) are amazing. Better than than even Android Studio's new "instant" run.

4 months with react-native, pretty unstable environment, lots of headache. Went back to native and happy.

I guess you just saved me a headache. thanks.

It sounded too good to be true. I'll give it more time to mature.

Thanks. That cleared up a lot of doubts for me. I was in 2 minds, trying to start app development with native android or react-native.

I guess reading this thread makes me choose native android.

IMO if you can afford to spend double time rewriting your app for another platform, just use native and don't think twice. But if you are constrained, react native might be a good choice among current cross-platform solutions.

There is enough to learn in native mobile before jumping into a wrapper for it. You read the RN docs and you'll see you still need to know the underlying tech pretty well.

But do you think that's because of its current state, or because the foundation behind it is not solid?

In other words, do you think it'll be in a usable state once it's polished and matured?

What was unstable about it and when did you try it? Was it iOS or Android? Curious about the details so we can fix that (I work on React Native).

If you aren't fully invested with React, you may consider NativeScript: https://www.nativescript.org/ The Android experience is a bit more mature, and you can still write cross-platform mobile apps with JavaScript (or Angular) without being in a WebView.

Don't have a production app, but i am developing a mobile app for a existing service. The app is very simple at the moment. App loads remote data and uses aysnc storage as well. I don't have Android exp except for tutorials. Getting to understand the React Native framework took some time but then its very straight forward easy process(Just Android app, have not tried out iOS). I do have good React exp which helped. For simple app it seems a very good solution.

I very seriously looked at React Native when developing my cross-platform app Countism ( http://countism.com/ ), but ultimately decided against using it due to the sheer number of features I would have to either write on my own or use 3rd party modules for (TableView, SQLite, etc.).

React is awesome and I love the promise of using the same concepts for native apps, but there is still a large commitment required to hand write a lot of extra code for full support on multiple platforms.

For now, Appcelerator Titanium is my tool of choice for cross-platform apps. It has much more stable cross-platform APIs and support, but even it has several quirks here and there, and doesn't support some more modern JavaScript features (ES2015, fetch, Promise) like React Native does out of the box.

For people who read this and are curious for more perspective on React Native and Titanium, there's a nice discussion here on the React Native Community Facebook Group with a developer who used to work at Appcelerator and now runs an agency where they use React Native exclusively: https://www.facebook.com/groups/react.native.community/perma...

Plenty of people! See: https://facebook.github.io/react-native/showcase.html

This isn't even a comprehensive list as it doesn't include apps like TaskRabbit Tasker App (http://tech.taskrabbit.com/blog/2016/03/24/react-native-andr...) which aren't public-facing.

Same question for me. We need a few permissions like SMS read (for phone number verification), NFC, GPS,etc...and I'm wondering how production ready React Native is.

SMS Read: You can start with manual entry of phone number verification. Top of the line android and iPhone apps still use manual entry of verification code and still offer good User Experience.

NFC: Except for payment, I never used NFC for anything, never seen any of my friends use it for any practical purpose. If your app is using payment systems, forget react native.

GPS: Supported by React native.

Something like Appcelerator Titanium took years to mature and become stable, I don't think you can get a multiplateform solution right that fast. It seems that React native on Ios is more stable than it is on Android. I wouldn't use it in production for android.

We are a Mumbai based home to office bus service marketplace. We recently ported our driver app to react native and the experience has been great. The app has been pretty well received.

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