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Comment by pjmlp | Hacker News Reader

Yet another company discovers what many of us did ages ago with multi-platform frameworks.

Additional layers not supported by platform owners, mean extra debugging efforts tracking down which layer is responsible, catching up with native SDK features, need to be an expert at both layers, lack of integration with native debugging tools...

But business always wants the Ferrari solution at the cost of a Fiat panda.

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I'm not an expert in iOS or Android, but I shipped few React Native apps. Most of my debugging efforts were in webapp. In fact I don't even remember anything about debugging native layer. And I actually built few native components including integration with compass and yandex maps. Sure, it's not Ferrari, nobody outside of US has money for that kind of apps, it was just few hundred bucks for few weeks of my time, but app works on both platforms and customer was satisfied. I think that React Native is great for many apps. If you're world-level corporation with dozens of developers and want absolutely best experience, go native, I guess, you don't really care about few million bucks thrown here and there.

Also don't underestimate a possibility to update app without those pesky moderators. It's awesome, push button and all users are updated.

C++ for business logic, with native views for the UI.

Works across both platforms, does not require additional SDKs and has all the debugging tools and API available without any additional FFI work.

Perhaps Swift is a better to use as a cross-platform LLVM compiled language, as it is very close to Kotlin in terms of syntax and patterns. C++ is a huge language and has a ton of gotchas.

I'm getting a pretty good React Native app working without understanding any Objective C or Swift underlying stuff. Sometimes you just want a Honda.

You are getting your users a pretty bad experience because you are lazy and only think about yourself. Users want Porsches, and they deserve them.

Users may want Porsches, but only a few are actually ready to pay for them.

Just like many devs for their tools it seems.

First of all, we've had people actually praise the app, second, no one deserves a Porsche. Except Bohr maybe :)

That's just false in most cases. A react native app even halfway well designed is indistinguishable from native.

That's pure nonsense. I have not seen one RN app that looks anything like native, including our own.

Why would it be nonsense, when it outputs native elements, what could give it away?

Because that's incorrect. Yes, it outputs `UIView` objects. But that's far from being native. Just a few examples: a button/"touchable opacity" is not a `UIButton`, it's a custom view where RN fakes the touch animation in JavaScript(!). Gesture recognizers are faked in JavaScript. Animation doesn't use Core Animation but fakes it either in JavaScript or in custom C++ implementation in the Animated module. It's one big lie to call React Native "Native".

Ok, thanks for a more informative reply, I didn't know about how some of the interop between JavaScript and native broke the native bits. That's good to know. Still though, this is a subset of native functionality. It sounds like there can still be two apps one native one 'react native' that are indistinguishable as long as they use that subset. No?

No. I only gave you small examples. For example, system margins and guides are not taken into account by the RN layout system, causing apps to look non-native. Almost everything is implemented reinvent-the-wheel style in RN, which makes it uncanny valley (and thus, very easy to spot).

The real fun starts when you need to do advanced debugging, the toolkit doesn't cover your use case properly or you hit performance problems you can't solve in the non-native language :)

I'm not sure why it would, I'm not doing anything outside of UI logic and interfacing with web services, so it's almost like all other React.js web development for me. Perhaps that's the sweet spot.

Whoa! Whoa! Are you suggesting that the end experience with a programming framework might depend on the details of your specific project and should not be inferred from general blog posts? That's insane! /s

While I don't disagree with your premise, "need to be an expert at both layers" is absolutely still true if you build your app natively for each platform (more so, even). At least with a common platform, if nothing else, you can share quite a bit of code, and that alone might make it worth the extra layers.

But the draw of cross platform is that you don't need to be an expert in them! Or at least, that's the advertised advantage.

For the happy path, you don't. And many apps can stick very comfortably on the happy path. I wrote a controller for a video mixer[0] that ran out-of-the-box on Android and iOS using websockets and everything Just Worked. (I still haven't released the iOS version due to lack of test equipment, but it runs just fine.)

[0] - http://bit.ly/buymyapp

I understood 'both layers' to mean both the abstraction layer, and the underlying layer being abstracted. Actually, you might even understand it as 'all 3 layers' here - iOS, Android, React Native.

And “developing” in RN requires you to be an expert in three fields: iOS, Android and the RN layer, which is often buggy. How is that better?

If you are already using React for the web (which I would believe is the biggest reason to use React Native), then the RN layer is pretty much already taken care of in term of expertise.

For the iOS and Android side, that's a constant between the two possibilities.

It's better because now your iOS and Android experts can concentrate much more on what they do best and your React experts can keep working on your UI like they always did.

React “experts” are not mobile experts, and often lack (and refuse to learn) basic mobile principles such as platform standards and accessibility.

One thing weird for me is I've had issues with Javascript UIs on different platforms but Java backends running on different platforms actually have been pretty consistent. Is there something about javascript or UIs (or both) that make cross platform support difficult?

You have control of your entire backends (usually). With JavaScript and browsers, it's the wild fucking west. Modern browsers are better about sandboxing but if you give 100,000 clients a gun, they will find 100,001 ways to shoot themselves.

“business always wants the Ferrari solution at the cost of a Fiat panda“

Isn’t that the promise of computers and technology? What would you suggest that business want?

> Isn’t that the promise of computers and technology? What would you suggest that business want?

The plot twist with software is that the overall cost (including running costs) of buying the ferarri is often lower than the cost of the Fiat panda.

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