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Comment by weixiyen | Hacker News Reader

Reasons why I am a React-Native developer:

- It works, really well.

- Iteration speed alone has helped us retain at an extremely high DAU/MAU ratio compared to years past.

- Both my apps have near 5 star rating across the board, probably the highest rated in the Sports category since we released, and none of our users notice that it is a RN app, which is really surprising b/c RN on Android is not up to par with iOS.

React-Native is not for every scenario, but I disagree with the author's final conclusion, that "the pros do not outweigh the cons". It's really quite the opposite in our case. The pros (OTA and productivity) heavily outweigh the cons.

Would love to see something better come out, but the recommended alternatives by the author wouldn't make the cut for us.

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>React-Native is not for every scenario

What scenario isn't it for?

Anything where you need to stay alive in the background and periodically do something.

Utterly false. Staying alive has nothing to do with React Native or Cordova or any particular framework. It's about implementing the native APIs that allow that behaviour.

I'm the author of a couple of modules that allow your RN app to operate in the background:

https://github.com/transistorsoft/react-native-background-fe...

https://github.com/transistorsoft/react-native-background-ge...

Both of these modules were ported from Cordova and have since been ported to NativeScript.

Thank you for linking those modules. I'm in the early stages of an app that will benefit from that functionality and admittedly my knowledge is based off of the first google result of a search for "react native background worker/task" (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/35376690/how-can-i-run-ba...). Which of course makes me an expert on the subject in this day and age.

So like a messaging app?

Uh no. Your application can be completely shut down and push notifications will still arrive on the phone for Android, iOS, and Windows Phone. Once the app is open, you load the new bits of the conversation.

Stuff in the background would be like video/audio calls, playing music, actively monitoring motion/gps (MapMyRun/Ride/Swim/etc), and a few other things that escape me at the moment.

On android at least, if you need to play music, couldn't you do that in a background service written Java and then have a UI written in RN that connects to that service?

Yes.

I have written an audio app in RN. I have no idea why you think it is not suitable for such use cases. I assume the OP was talking about games.

I actually meant more along the lines of if you already have 2 very successful iOS and Android apps and a process to release quickly and you've already found real meaningful traction. In this case, the cost of switching is probably not worth it versus continuously improving your existing apps.

If you are looking to release games quickly, the choice is generally Unity, although I hate how all the Unity games take forever to load, but it's a great way to get your game out quickly, and the good games will overcome the load times issue.

Is the app publicly available? I'd like to check it out

Dare I say games? I honestly can't think of anything else.

Definitely. Unless you have an extremely simple game, you're probably not even using the OS's built in UI framework; something like Android NDK[0] and whatever its iOS equivalent is are more suitable.

[0] https://developer.android.com/ndk/index.html

may I know the name of your app? would love to see an example of 5-star RN app :)

sleeperbot

Big fan of sleeperbot, especially the weekly sleeper report. Had no clue it was developed using RN

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