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Comment by dansiemens | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft is using React Native for Windows [0] for their Office applications [1]. As a fan of RN this would be the first avenue I’d explore if I had to develop something for Windows.

[0] https://microsoft.github.io/react-native-windows/ [1] https://microsoft.github.io/react-native-windows/resources-s...

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This is a bit misleading. Only minor parts of Office are built with React Native, not the whole thing.

Teams is, and it's IMO the worst Office app available. I don't have time to get into all the reasons why right now because I need to sleep and it always leads to a 30 minute irl rant or a multiparagraph screed about the complete breakdown of their corporate work culture and terrible UI tooling that they can't fix a context menu rendering bug in their own damn "native" first-party corporate communications app when _They're The Company Writing The UI/GFX API THAT REACT NATIVE USES!!!!_ hooooosaaaaa I don't work there anymore, I don't work there anymore. Good night HN.

Would appreciate if you could spare some time to elaborate. I’ve had pretty much the worst experience with Teams of all communication solutions. I just can’t figure out what’s going on with it. On Macs it constantly misbehaves. Is it due to RN?

No. Teams is a terrible application regardless of the UI Framework.

This is not to say that React Native is good.

Teams tries to be your new desktop, it provides a file browser, calendar, meeting scheduling, access to edit your Office documents and take One Notes. It reminds me of an alternative shell for Windows 95.

It also has an embedded chat app. This embedded chat app has new messages at top on some tabs, and new at bottom on other tabs. It prevents me from having more than one chat open. This chat app only supports RTF for formatting (who the fuck still uses RTF?) which means it struggles to process markdown and other rich formatting. Pasting some text that it decides is going in a box can be laborious to remove.

It's just a bad app.

Teams is react.js

Isn't it AngularJS 1.0?

Facebook Messenger uses React Native.

WhatsApp Desktop uses WinUI.

WhatsApp is superior.

I don't get React Native. It's such a huge, complicated abstraction with no ability to performance tweak. I don't understand how a company as big as Facebook doesn't have enough resources to build native apps for each platform. These UIs are the simplest app you could build as well.

> Facebook Messenger uses React Native.

This is misleading at best, if not outright wrong.

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