Hacker News Reader

Comment by dirtylowprofile | Hacker News Reader

We used React Native back then when it first came out. Surprisingly the problems that exists back then, still exists today like red error screen, slow TableView scroll, upgrading RN problems.

It is too late for Facebook because a lot of high profile startups are moving away from it. When you release something like this and then have the OSS deal with it and not responed to PRs for several months and years, it leaves a bad taste.

View on HN

>because a lot of high profile startups are moving away from it

Lucky for everyone there is a world beyond "high profile startups" whatever that means. You may even argue "high profile startups" is an irrelevant percentage in the job market.

I have started to interpret "startup" as a synonym for "company". Startup is the hip thing all want to be, but really the point is providing something for money, which is what any boring company does.

You called out the red error screen and that's something that they explicitly called out as fixed in this version of React Native.

And it looks like they are a lot faster about responding to PRs now.

Tt seems to me like they are doing a good job improving React Native!

To that extent, I also found that Android is usually treated as a 2nd class citizen. Which is understandable, given the marketshare, but frustrating nonetheless. It often sounds like something is easily do-able (like Accessibility) ... IF you're on iOS. We recently developed an app for a client of ours for Android, replicating their native iOS app in React Native. That was not a good experience.

> given the marketshare

FYI, Android has 75% of marketshare worldwide and 55% in the US.

Depends on your market. Instagram basically gained meaningful traction for years despite completely ignoring android.

I wonder if that would play out the same now. That was a long time ago.

I think it's more the marketshare of who will pay for apps/subscriptions, which is often quoted as tilted towards iOS users. I'm not sure how true that is, though it make some sense given how many apps cost money on iOS vs Android and that iOS devices are on average more expensive.

I'm not sure if that's true anymore. Last year I switched to Android and paid for some high quality apps, spending more than I have probably ever on Apple. I've noticed that Android free apps are usually more restrictive and pester the user to upgrade more than they do on iOS - I assume Apple ban this, but these dark patterns must work otherwise why would a company tarnish their image with them?

If you look at Android users as a whole, percentage wise of course they will pay less because they are a lot more popular in less well off countries. On the other hand Google's carrier billing support is a lot more extensive than Apple's, so actually being able to pay is less friction.

During the past year I’ve worked with 2 large Fortune 500 companies (they are everywhere globally and everyone knows them) whose main business is in consumer products and services.

Amount of paying mobile users for both companies is clearly dominated by the iOS. About 1:5-1:10 ratio.

is that globally or in the markets like US, i assume it a lot closer in markets that have more hi end devices and disposable income.

but it is sure that apple customers are more used to pay for applications. that's something that i noticed like 8 years when i switched from windows to osx/macbook. while on windows you could find free basic utility software like rippers converters and so on, on macbook they usually where paid applications.

I don't have any recent numbers, but high(er) end clients generally go iOS first due to their own market expectations and distribution.

I don’t think it’s meant to be, there are definite edge cases that are very hard to solve, such as when manufacturers decided to alter android behavior. I also think that the ecosystem has far more iOS engineers than it does android, which leads to an imbalance in support.

Disclaimer: am contributor to react-native & iOS dev.

Is the colour and visual display of errors really considered a significant problem that prevents technology adoption? I must be getting old.

The red screen error isn’t about the color. It’s in reference to the uninformative error screen that often pops up when developing with React Native. The amount of information you get from the error, stacktrace, etc. is not all the dissimilar to seeing a blue screen of death on Windows. It could have been any color and the issue would have been the same.

Visual consistency is important. Users quickly become suspicious when they see visual glitches (think of your car making weird screeching noises while driving).

Which high profile startups are moving away from it?

AirBnB - https://medium.com/airbnb-engineering/sunsetting-react-nativ...

I’d say AirBnB is no longer a startup... with their pockets I’d also have native teams.

AirBnb always comes up as an example of a team abandoning RN but it seems like no one actually read the entire blog post. Migrating an existing native app to RN is going to be hard for anyone. Starting from scratch with CRNA? Not so much.

Uber: https://twitter.com/alanzeino/status/1101167947874103296

I also talked to someone from Fb recently, and he said that even some internal teams have moved away from it.

At WWDC 2017 I was in the keynote speech line with two of the Facebook client team devs. According to them the entire client team was trying to get rid of RN, so maybe they succeeded.

Udacity: https://engineering.udacity.com/react-native-a-retrospective...

Great. Maybe that will mean less sluggish desktop apps executed in a browser and more native language experiences.

Unlikely, since RN isn’t executed in a browser.

Not a browser, but it is a whole lot of JavaScript (it running inside of a browser would be so much worse, try any Cordova app, even "modern" ones like Notion).

Flutter seems like a great substitute today, at least for Android.

Have fun with it being abandoned by Google in X years.

Might as well develop natively if it's only good for Android.

Flutter imitates native by rendering everything from scratch, after a few major updates to iOS that's bound to be abandoned.

Some applications especially heavily customized and complex ones profit from consistent UI across platforms.

I created many apps with React-Native that could also be built with web technology and would mostly look and feel the same.

But you're right with Google tech being abandoned; I prefer Revery to Flutter.

I like Revery. It actually seems a bit more approachable than Flutter and it's goals are pretty good (Supporting the Web as a compile target is important nowadays).

But how much more certain is the support for Revery over that for Flutter? What's Outrun's history with large projects? What incentives do they have?

Flutter is also aiming to target the web: https://medium.com/flutter-io/hummingbird-building-flutter-f...

Revery looks really good, but it isn't ready yet.

It has a very similar approach to a React/RN project.

I'd eventually switch over to Revery when/if it's production ready.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com