rawrmaan

Not true! Play my game Falcross (https://www.falcross.com) on iOS or Android and tell me if you feel any lag. It's written in React Native. Less than 3% of the UI is native code.

You CAN make highly performant software, even games, with React Native. You just need to take the time to truly understand the platform, and you will reap massive benefits.

80/20 Sales and Marketing by Perry Marshall

I don't agree. I find the problem with YouTube is that there's too much quality content and I need to keep myself from wasting too much time on it.

Main site and Ads Manager both down for me.

Man, I had to read that headline like 10 times before it made sense. /r/titlegore

It just seems to me like the "infinite scalability" promise of serverless is only realistic if you have no database. Because inevitably, you'll hit database scaling issues due to query patterns and suboptimal indexes LONG before you'll have a hard time scaling up your fleet of servers because you're getting too many requests.

Okay, that's a great solution. I actually had no idea that was possible.

I think a lot of people have tried “serverless” and found it to present more challenges than it solves. How, for example, do you connect to a Postgres database from Lambda/Cloud Functions? As far as I can tell, the answer is: You don’t, you use a different database.

No-worries devops experiences are nothing new. See Heroku.

Great point!

I can't even imagine how much work went into this. Stripe does a great job of tackling the toughest problems and making it looks easy!

This seems really counterproductive to me. This post is extremely relevant to the HN community and could do a lot of good if people see it here. I read it before this message was put up and thought it was really well-written.

My game Falcross is written entirely in RN, and I believe it is the biggest production game on either store that's full RN:

[App Store]: https://itunes.apple.com/in/app/falcross-logic-puzzles/id500...

[Google Play]: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.rawrmaan.f...

This is my #1 most desired feature on Uber and Lyft.

Let's say you have a component deep in the hierarchy that needs to update based on a small but frequent change in a large object (thousands of keys). With Redux, you have to figure out how to diff the old and new copies of that object to figure out what changed. With MobX, you just observe the value of the exact key you're interested in.

That's just one example, but I generally spent a ton of time writing complex shouldComponentUpdate functions and therefore making lots of mistakes with Redux. I've found MobX much more suited to building complex UIs with deep hierarchies and tens to hundreds of total elements on the screen at once, where updating only exactly when necessary is critical.

I use MobX for my game Falcross, which I wrote about in the State of React Native 2018 thread from a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17316877

I initially used Redux, and I found it actually technically impossible to get the game to perform well using Redux. I tried everything.

Yeah, MobX is significantly easier to reason about, even if it may have a few idiosyncrasies that make debugging more challenging. Also, performance optimization of React components is a cinch with MobX and a nightmare with Redux.

I can’t comment on Ionic, but for the features you’re talking about, RN is definitely suitable. The RN ecosystem of native modules is certainly massive. Off the top of my head:

Forms: tcomb-form-native Recording: react-native-audio GPS: react-native-background-geolocation Camera: react-native-camera

I haven’t tried a recent enough version of react-navigation to comment, but the older version was so bad in terms of complexity, missing basic features and inconsistent paradigms that I am permanently taste averted to ever installing the npm package again.

react-native-navigation appears to me to be the best available option. The main downside is that it kind of “takes over” your app in terms of the native bootstrapping process on either platform, which can make integrating other native modules slightly more challenging.

Your app looks fantastic, by the way!

I’ll just have to disagree. There’s a bit of a learning curve, and yes the React project is full of warnings, but Xcode has filters for that, and breakpoints work brilliantly. I guess I have a big advantage in having 6+ years of native iOS dev experience.

I addressed the performance in another reply, but I would agree that it is surprising. And yeah, the UI is mostly iOS-inspired. Looking to bring it to more of a happy medium over time.

1) It runs very well without a network connection, you just can't access the online features. I've written my own syncing logic to make sure a user can experience the game for days or even months without having a network connection, and then have all their progress saved when they connect.

2) It works very well on low bandwidth connections. The puzzles are represented as strings and there are no remote images loaded.

3) For features that make sense in this game (sharing, IAP, haptics, notifications), it supports native functionality flawlessly. It is very easy to write native modules for RN, and there are may great npm packages that implement commonly needed native functionality.

Thanks for the kind words! Yup, fixed the tutorial button for the next release, and I should add @3x assets--I have poor vision so I forget about stuff like that.

Thank you! This is actually my fault and is fixed in my upcoming release. All of the other views are iPhone X optimized, which is quite easy to do in RN.

I was A/B testing a much better description and forgot to apply the winner. Thanks for the reminder!

I don't have a lot of Android devices to test with, though it looks perfect on the ones I have. I would love to see screenshots of the imperfections you're talking about, it would be a huge help! If you see this, please send them to rawrmaan [at] gmail [dot] com. Thank you!

I will say that Android performance, especially in recent RN releases, has been one of my biggest issues with RN.

Everything about the game is highly optimized and performs beautifully (60fps) on all 2013+ iOS devices, but inexplicably performs very poorly on even some very new Android devices. I think it has to do with problems with the Android driver for Native Animated.

Hmm interesting find. The app title is mostly for ASO to target the keyword “picross” but I’d never tried that keyword before. Very strange!

Glad you’re enjoying the game :)

Yup.

Lots of negative or neutral posts in here, so let me chime in: I love React Native.

It’s not perfect, but it’s very damn good. One of the most impressive pieces of software I’ve encountered in 9+ years of mobile and full stack development.

I do all my projects in RN now, and I believe it gives me a 2-3x iteration speed advantage over my competitors with indistinguishable-from-native interactions (using react-native-navigation) and the ability to be on all platforms. For a solo dev, these advantages are insanely powerful and are the major reasons that my business is viable.

Last year I rewrote my game Falcross in RN and I’m so happy with my choice. Seriously, check it out and see if you can tell it’s a “hybrid” app: [App Store]: https://itunes.apple.com/in/app/falcross-logic-puzzles/id500... [Google Play]: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.rawrmaan.f...

At 5k+ DAU I believe it is the largest production game written in RN.

There are more apps but I’m on mobile and it’s too hard to link them.

Major kudos to the RN team for all their hard work. RN makes me feel very dangerous as a solo developer and honestly makes mobile development more fun than I have ever imagined (especially paired with TypeScript). Thank you!

Good luck getting a large population of users from varying backgrounds and age ranges to want to hang out in a completely unmoderated place where anyone can be attacked, harassed, or shown obscene content.

Well, if you remove your assumptions about how incapable people are, TypeScript is the way to make large JS code bases maintainable. It doesn’t even change any of the JS syntax, it just adds to it. It’s the opposite of CoffeeScript in many ways.