Our react-native experience at Drops (so far) (opens in new tab)

(medium.com)

38 pointslegothief7y ago4 comments

4 comments

Seems fair. What ended up pushing me back to 100% native was the lack of a robust navigation solution for RN. Every community library had its own compromises that, in the end, were not worth it.

That and most libraries are still in javascript (not typescript), which make any large RN project a huge pain.

It also seems like every medium/large RN app has to reengineer the wheel to accomplish stuff. Redux, navigation, user state management, etc. It always felt like one step forward, 2 steps back.

legothiefOP7y ago

Fortunately almost all (ca. 80%) of the libraries we use have either internal or external Typescript definitions, and it's nice to see more and more d.ts files popping up in these repos (or on definitelytyped)

http://definitelytyped.org/

TheAceOfHearts7y ago

Well, it's all a matter of tradeoffs. It's good that these articles are showing up, so people can better evaluate each tool for its merits.

I don't have much experience with React Native, however I've written a few small personal Electron apps. It's amazing how fast you can get a cross-platform utility app up and running. As for it's cons... Well, it's certainly not particularly fast, and it doesn't match the platform's user interface. I'd definitely suggest avoiding Electron for many projects, but it still has its place.

matchbok7y ago

Yeah for sure. Because you still have to deal with the native things like Xcode/gradle/swift/etc I'd actually prefer a super simple declarative UI framework that lies on top of whatever native solution you pick. Writing UI for iOS (storyboards or programmatically) is a huge pain. Meanwhile TSX + flexbox is a huge productivity boost.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

4 comments

matchbok7y ago

Seems fair. What ended up pushing me back to 100% native was the lack of a robust navigation solution for RN. Every community library had its own compromises that, in the end, were not worth it.

That and most libraries are still in javascript (not typescript), which make any large RN project a huge pain.

It also seems like every medium/large RN app has to reengineer the wheel to accomplish stuff. Redux, navigation, user state management, etc. It always felt like one step forward, 2 steps back.

legothiefOP7y ago

http://definitelytyped.org/

TheAceOfHearts7y ago

Well, it's all a matter of tradeoffs. It's good that these articles are showing up, so people can better evaluate each tool for its merits.

matchbok7y ago

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse