The thing with frameworks like this is that the time invested could be lost if the framework looses traction. I am very hesitant to use a framework like this for anything serious and business-oriented.
I've started working on a side-project developing a mobile application when Fuse[1] got "traction". I remember the bashing on HN regarding the name (since well libfuse). I'm usually all sys/backend, but I've got into it. You start digging through their board and see a lot of examples, catch around stuff on their channel and so on. Kind of joy sometimes.
The thing is, I've been planning to support both iOS and Android from the early start. So that was really a great choice, it looked promising. Or so was I thinking.
After fine 7 months, my new shiny mobile app. was behind somehow manageable code and one developer - me. Stay still, I never worked on mobile before. So I went for market and hit few clients at an early stage. Good news everyone, we got this. As a co-founder with other two, designer and marketing manager, we went out as a `free` and rent the magical space. The hype was there and -. Clients started requesting features, which meant another success. The ideas presented were fine with us and I started working furiously on it. Pressure and all, inb4 start digging for more developers. Few remote devs and features are ready, users love them. Now it gets to more advanced features, UI, code starts to get abstract, and devs aren't sure if they web, script or compile. We somehow managed to stay on ball.
After five such months, we ditched the Fuse and rewrote to native. Since devs where remote, they understood the cards. Some of them are still here. Now we are all happy, codebase is eh.. fine, stuff are supported, you know.
The story speaks I think. These tools, at early stage, should be took as a grant of salt. I do however appreciate work given towards creating xp stuff. Some of these tools are great for prototyping.
Maybe we shouldn’t be building frameworks on top of frameworks on top of other languages?
Maybe officially supported tools/languages are often a good choice.
Edit: Going by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_radioactive_isotopes_b..., it seems that most of the halflives fall in the 10^(n where n <= 6) seconds category which is smaller than a human lifetime.
At least React Native has been around for a while and has a good sized community.
This is a neat little project but I would treat it like a toy unless you were willing to step up and take over maintence before usi it for a production app.
(This wasn’t meant as a stab at React Native, it was meant as a warning about picking up frameworks that don’t have much history. RN is a few years old. I don’t think it will disappear next year).
RN is an entirely different beast...
RN came from a giant company that uses it in its core product. Big difference.
cf https://talks.golang.org/2012/splash.article
(Agree with parent but not wanting Go to be left out of the "giant company" bucket.)
The framework is a nice idea, and will definitely help into diversifying some of the mobile frontend stuff.
On the other hand you can't compare RN to this framework.
As the person you commented on, facebook has been using RN on its main products like instagram, so it has proven that the framework can be placed on production ready apps with a massive userbase.
Yeah the kids nowadays are terrible.
Large codebases have never been particularly welcoming to newcomers.
We already have a widely adopted, widely compatible, highly developed and open framework for cross platform development: webpages.
My confidence that Mr. J. Random Hacker - or even J. Random Company Inc. - can do better than this - and support it for over 2 decades - is close to 0.
In my application I needed to display data incoming from a sensor. I can only access this data using the native functions and it comes at around 500Hz from 16 sensors.
For comparison, in Electron, when you call a function defined in a module written in C++, you can get the answer in under 1 ms. When using something like Cordova, you have to serialize the data which can take a seriously long time and then you have to wait for the callback to execute. On Android I suppose it is quite possible to write a V8 native plugin and achieve this performance, but not on iOS where you are limited to included webkit.
As for the Android responsiveness, the problem lies with the single threaded nature of JavaScript. CPUs on android phones _suck_ in single core performance. When I was looking for a good solution for multi platform development, I have found of a tech meeting that was supposed to present solutions taken by several different companies. It turned to be a huge complaint-fest about Android javascript performance and the only happy people were those using Xamarin (which is native).
Edit: Note that I think that using web views for applications like banking or chat and so on is perfectly fine. My issue is with apps that eat a lot of incoming data and/or have to change what is displayed very often.
Perhaps systems that automatically build out to iOS have not been updated to use these features, or there is something else going on in Cordova to introduce latency? Because for at least 2 years now there is no reason to have the problem you describe.
You clearly haven’t used WKWebView. It renders off-process, so actually data passi gbetween your native code and the JS contained in it is even slower. This is in addition to the many many many limitations due to the off-process nature of the system.
What good does it do to make a webpage using technologies that will have support two decades from now (by the way, that isn't happening either), if what you need is people using your webpage/app now?
I guess Kotlin and Kotlin Native (which runs on ios) could be a good started for building a KotlinReactNative, which allows creating an UI in a DSL based syntax that works on multiple platforms.
Do you have any info on why Airbnb stopped using React Native? Would love a good read on why.
Right now, the only thing I'm currently aware of is that their navigation library (native-navigation [1]) is pretty much unmaintained and they are trying to plan out a transition to move it under react-community.[2] The only thing that hints at their slowing use of React Navigation is the mention of conversion to React Native's navigation getting a much lower priority to the point that the native-navigation library has essentially become unmaintained.[3] But when I initially read that, it didn't come off as Airbnb deciding to stop using React Native.
[1] https://github.com/airbnb/native-navigation
[2] https://github.com/airbnb/native-navigation/issues/145
[3] https://github.com/airbnb/native-navigation/issues/145#issue...
Is this true? I'd be interested to see a citation on AirBnB stopping using it, last I heard they were going all-in.
As for the issues with navigation, isn't it just that there isn't a great navigation library yet?
And one of the main persons behind ReactNative at AirBnB seems to be less enthousiastic in his latest interview.. However i cant find the interview anymore
Like Leland said above, we're still working hard and making exciting progress on React Native but we continue to invest in native platforms as well and product teams make a case by case decision on which one to use.
Hope that clarifies things a bit :)
I don't think Airbnb has ever been "completely going all-in on React Native" or "completely dropping React Native", but people always seem to want it to be one or the other. The truth is it's almost always something in the middle.
You wouldn't have this problem if you start a React Native project from scratch.
They seem to be still using React Native. Have you heard otherwise?
A lot will depend on why you need cross-platform support at launch. For most direct to consumer apps, your intended user base should skew to one platform or the other and should be large enough to support a beta and launch on a single platform. Not launching with both platforms supported won't make or break your app and launching with both without much mobile experience to begin with could even prove to be a distraction while you try to iterate on you're app's design.
If you're selling an app to businesses, then not supporting both iOS and Android at launch would be a real roadblock. In that case starting and maybe even staying with Ionic could make sense.
This just isn't true. Airbnb is actively using React Native a lot and has not "stopped using it seriously". I'm not sure where you got this impression. Some people responding to this are mentioning the transition of the potential native-navigation library to react-community. This is a library that we never actually used in production, though the plan was to move off of our internal library to this one shortly after open sourcing it. Priorities shifted internally (to other, more pressing react-native related things that aren't OSS), and we have not yet been able to do that. Since the community really wanted to work on the library despite us not actively maintaining it, transitioning it to react-community seemed like a better thing to do than further fragment the community by having people fork it. I'm still hopeful that we will be able to migrate to it in the future.
Source: I am the tech lead of React Native infrastructure at Airbnb and the primary author of native-navigation.
Where does AirBnB actually use ReactNative, and where is it purely native? I was in the understanding the move to ReactNative was not going "the way you preferred".
I can imagine there are some roadblocks using it everywhere. Or some hesitation from Native Developers.
For me also: Using JavaScript as a language run inside a interpreter inside my app doesn't seem like a smart move. Also native like navigation, activity lifecycle, animation etc are probably hard to get right with React Native.