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Comment by distances | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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We built our app (Dugout FC) in RN for iOS and implemented Android about 3 months after the Android RN stuff was released. Performance was ok (and getting better with later RN versions) and it has a > 4 star rating in the play store.

Totally love React Native. Unless you are doing something pretty unusual, I can't see a reason not to choose it over native dev.

If you're able to share, would love to hear:

What does "performance was ok" mean in your context? Any stats to share?

What's the workload profile of Dugout FC like?

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.

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?

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).

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?

I can't speak to the experience of building a large Android app with RN, but a regular old pages, lists and forms app (for which RN shines) it's a good choice.

It's quite the opposite actually, I found out it was working best on iOS.

Well yes, that's what the article says, so I was asking whether it would be good enough on Android already now.

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