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Comment by Findeton | Hacker News Reader

And here I was thinking about what to use for native mobile apps. So what are the current alternatives to React Native?

React native is used by Facebook, Discord, Wal-Mart, Baidu, etc etc it's not going to be abandoned. This is one person's random click-baity rumormongering tweet. Facebook showcased react native at it's F8 developer conference just one month ago. It's a great tool, use it if it works for you.

There's a ton even beyond old mainstays like Xamarin, Phonegap/Cordova, Titanium. Even Alibaba made one:

https://weex.apache.org

There's new stuff like Ionic, NativeScript, and Flutter. There's obscure ones like Codename One. And there's speculative ones like SCADE and Kotlin Native which are really just language bridges.

Why would you let a rumor influence your decision? Also, even if it were true, why would it influence your decision?

Flutter is looking pretty good right now but I haven't used it ever.

NativeScript is pretty good. It can be used without a framework, or you can use it with Angular or Vue (and perhaps others). I used it with vanilla ES6 about a year ago for a side project. After finishing the project, I ported it to RN to compare the two. At the time, I felt that RN had the upper edge, because it could hot-reload updates more quickly. I suspect that the NativeScript team has made progress on that since then, though.

Here's the repo for that app I created with NativeScript: https://github.com/BinaryNate/voxophone

I would seriously consider Xamarin. The tooling with ReSharper is great. LiveXAML gives you the same instant reload that React Native has.

Xamarin Forms gives you a cross platform UI, but you can use fully native Fragments/ViewControllers where needed.

Xamarin is awful. Incredibly slow tooling and useless UI libraries.

My mobile teams threatened to quit if we adopted Xarmin after building an app in it.

Xamarin is consistently roasted in the Stack Overflow dev surveys.

Flutter?

Can you do background services, notifications, etc stuff Beyond just ui

Yeah. You can even implement custom classes in Java/Kotlin and ObjC/Swift and interop them in dart.

so this isn't really an alternative to RN right now. As for basic features you have to know native development.

Flutter is very much in beta still for the next couple months at least, so you'd expect that.

If I was choosing between RN and Flutter as something to learn, assuming I had no prior experience in either, then Flutter is probably a better choice. I'm sure there are arguments both ways though, but Flutter is very 'solid' for lack of a better term.

Which basic features require native development?

background service

notification

sending intents "The other popular use-case for Intents is to call external components such as a Camera or File picker. For this, you would need to create a native platform integration (or use an existing plugin)."

UI isn't everything for all the apps

There are fluuter plugins (not third party) for notifications and intents. Background service can be tracked at this issue https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/3671

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