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Comment by matchbok | Hacker News Reader

I just really can't see RN gaining much traction outside of experimental/small apps. You very much still need experienced mobile devs to debug the multitude of Java/kotlin/XCode/Android issues that come up because of how fragile the entire workflow is. Running a business on that is non-starter.

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The Discord devs use RN and their app is anything but experimental or small. And there are by far not the only one (Skype, Instagram, Wix, UberEats, Tesla, Baidu, Salesforce).

Native devs don’t like RN because the mobile dev supply gets bigger which hurts their market value. That’s the real reason of your post, spreading FUD.

RN has its limitations but for 80% of apps it’s absolutely fine.

I am quite sure uber eats is not using RN anymore (evidence here: https://www.appbrain.com/app/uber-eats:-local-food-delivery/...). There are many examples of companies abandoning RN, e.g. udacity, airbnb...

But the vast majority stays with RN.

I don't know and don't really care. Most apps I use work as PWAs anyway, I also prefer the browser. But i can only speak for myself, time will tell...

Exactly. It's the same with Rails.

I love rails.

For every app still using it there are 10 abandoning it.

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

Please stop with the market value/FUD attacks, they are nonsense and childish. You clearly have an axe to grind.

I don't like RN because I have had to sunset multiple large projects in RN. Javascript is a mess for mobile development. The interaction between the native layer is a mess. Hell, it's still not even a 1.0 release yet - smart CTOs would be insane to suggest it as a tool. Just look at the upgrade guides they post - a mess.

Luckily the most RN devs come from the web and have a much higher pain tolerance.

Chuckled at this. But honestly I find debugging the “native” side of RN apps much more painful than any type of web development I’ve had experience with. Then again perhaps I’ve never worked with a 100% pure native app so would love to hear some more perspectives on this.

IDK what you mean but there so many things much easier and straightforward with web-based tech, eg sane layout systems like flexbox are way superior than anything native frameworks have to offer.

Yep, I just upgraded my RN app and their official upgrade strategy is to go line by line and update your project with the changes they made between versions.

https://react-native-community.github.io/upgrade-helper/?fro...

Judging by the number of React Native jobs on Indeed that ship has already sailed.

I have to agree with you. Moreover, you also go through plenty of pain to make the app work well on both platforms, with surprisingly much platform specific code.

While I am not necessarily an advocate of React Native, I don't think your point is fair. React Native never promises that its users can "write once and run anywhere".

Fair enough, but my point stands. Flutter is much more pleasant in cross-platform development even though this isn't even its primary goal.

I understand this is not a trivial problem, just comparing my experiences with RN with Flutter.

I run. A voip app for call centers. You can't imagine the pain.

if you only need another listicle app with a push notification or two, React Native is there

but so are a bunch of other things that are easier to use

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