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Comment by zpr | Hacker News Reader

One of the biggest things React has going for it, other than being maintained by Facebook and having a much larger community, is React Native. You can learn one web framework and now also make compelling, real native apps. To me those are both deal makers.

Surprised I haven't seen this mentioned more in the thread.

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Or you can just compile any HTML5 mobile app using Cordova and in 99% of the cases your users won't notice any performance difference between native-app and HTML5 app.

Maybe for extremely simple webapps that might be true, but for any non-trivial Cordova+React based app you can't come anywhere close to the UX you can get with React Native without some extreme engineering effort. I'd much rather eat the cost to port the HTML5 app to React Native instead. Yes, the users DO notice.

Inability to have the same level of control over soft keyboard behavior is one of the top problems with Cordova, IMO.

Source: wrote & maintained a Cordova+React app on iOS/Android for 3 yrs.

Yeah, you are right, I was mostly referring to the performance part. If you need native UI elements or native UI interaction it's harder to do that in a HTML5 app.

I mostly worked on games, where the UI is custom and there are very few similarities to the UI of the OS, so it worked pretty good.

Yup, the marginal convenience advantages to web apps are so minimal compared to the ability to write legitimate native mobile apps.

Vue.js and Angular are complete non-starters for me since they don't have native counterparts.

I agree, there are many competitors to React for targeting the DOM, but there is much less competition for targeting Native. I hope to see more JSX-to-Native engines pop up soon to solve that problem.

Exactly this. In fact (as someone who only knows Swift for mobile dev) learning React was my first step to get into React-Native, so I can make iOS and Android apps.

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