Comment by wharvle | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wharvle | Hacker News Reader

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At the time I used it, it was almost worth it just to use RN for Android even if you did iOS in Swift, just because styling on Android was so hellish ("There must be some non-crazy way to set a default typeface for my app. Right?" LOL wrong; "setting this color on this Material input field must be easy" LOL nope, welcome to Java metaprogramming just to set a goddamn color), the documentation-suggested way to structure apps was so bad that you'd be reaching for other solutions anyway if you valued your sanity (I wanna say Square was at the forefront, here? It was some company like that. Like your best bet was just to find their libraries and blog posts and do exactly what they did, ignore the official docs), and in some cases the native libraries for Google APIs were less-capable than the Javascript ones anyway (Maps was one, I remember—god, what a surprise that was to find out).

But that was like 5 years ago so maybe it's gotten better.

Although I haven't used it, Jetpack Compose exists now, so that and SwiftUI are pretty similar. On a previous project I was contracting on, the CTO managed to bash out a basic Android version of the iOS app I was working on without any Kotlin experience by going through the SwiftUI views one by one and implementing them in Jetpack Compose.

I agree with you. RN still sucks on some aspects, but it's quite an amazing technology and I'm grateful it exists.

Nah, among cross-platform, RN has stagnated while Flutter has sped past.

The key issue I see these days is that it's just not worth it to build a mobile app these days unless your payment flow happens outside of the app.

I had bad experiences with it 7 years ago, but really good experiences with it recently. If you stick to native modules managed by expo you'll be in a great place! You can run into dependency hell if you use a random react-native npm module that was last updated 5 years ago.

I think most users would prefer an RN app over a Flutter app, especially on iOS, because the RN app will feel much more native because it renders using native views, instead of a Skia framebuffer.

> it's just not worth it to build a mobile app these days unless your payment flow happens outside of the app

not true at all, 85% of something is better than 100% of nothing. This is coming from someone who hates mobile apps and apple's grip on them

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