Hacker News Reader

Comment by sebleon | Hacker News Reader

The logic still applies.

1. Start with platform you're most comfortable with. 2. Iterate on product until you have a winning formula 3. Replicate on 2nd platform to double revenues

Building is a lot easier than identifying what to build, better to speedily experiment on one platform.

View on HN

In my opinion the new logic is build in React Native (unless your app fits in the 10% of use cases that won't work well with RN), then deploy to both at once. We have had excellent results.

React Native is great for apps, and if it's a game, just use Unity. They're building up their internal CI infrastructure and it works better every month.

Tbh, I'm not sure how many use cases don't fit either React Native or Unity, I'd practically never choose to do an app another way these days.

I'd say RN won't work well in 99% cases.

Could you elaborate?

I'd say you are probably using a lot more React Native apps than you realize right now.

I wish everyone downvoting you would at least state their problem with your post

I rather use native UI code + C++ for business logic, use Qt or Xamarin than even bother with React Native.

My take is that RN is great for demo apps or simple UIs, but I would not choose it for a production app where performance matters (ie. using camera, audio, custom controls, platform-specific SDKs, multi-threading, etc). You're definitely going to do heavy lifting in native code, and a hybrid app quickly becomes a mess. Dealing with multiple environments and super slow build times in Xcode will seriously slow down development cycles.

IMO RN is no exception to the Simple vs Easy trade-off [1] Not to mention using RN gives FB a legal blank check from your company [2]

[1] http://chrisfrost.com/wp-content/uploads/SimpleVsEasy-478x51...

[2] https://medium.com/@raulk/if-youre-a-startup-you-should-not-...

That article is out of date. As of September 2017, FB has re-licensed React under the MIT open source license and dropped the patent stuff.

I don't think you contradicted anything I said. I would say special camera apps, multi-threading etc. are not needed that often.

As for slower build times, that is the beauty of RN. Building is not needed most of the time just an initial build and a rebuild every time some of the base configurations change or you are creating code outside of RN.

> fb dropped patent stuff

Ah, thanks for the update, glad they did that

> are not needed that often

Right - statistically most apps are probably throwaway code for hackathons or demos. However, I'd venture to say that >50% of serious apps will end up needing performance boosts from native code.

> Building is not needed most of the time

You need to rebuild every time you make a change in native code (obj-c or swift). Hot reloading is cool for JS changes, but bloat from RN becomes a nightmare when debugging obj-c or swift issues.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com