[davidmurdoch]

I started working on a react native+redux project myself recently (after working with react on its own for about 1 year) and have been feeling the same way. And we've just been working on auth, data persistence, and screen navigation.

My problem with it is that there is so much abstraction that almost no prior knowledge from using other frameworks or libraries is useful. It seems like everything is magic.

Here is a chain of react tech things: React->Flux->Redux->Redux-Persist->PersistGate

The latter is talked about in documentation, i.e., "do it like PersistGate does", but I can't find PersistGate anywhere.

With so many react extensions and libraries all having their own helper functions to do everything it seems like we are no longer programming, but instead, we are tasked with stringing together configuration functions after searching for hours for the currently relevant documentation.

I think react does some pretty amazing things, but the learning curve is too steep because of fragmented documentation (mostly the community created how-tos are the problem here), confusing abstractions, and poor method naming (thinking about redux's `reducer` here).

Anyway, I, and several programmers at my company, share your sentiments; you are not alone. This will probably be my last greenfield react project.

[hungerstrike]

This is exactly my experience. Eventually, I skipped redux/mobx/etc altogether by creating a singleton EventEmitter which can hold application state objects, emit events when the state changes and persist it to SQLite. For data that does not need to be in memory, I just access SQLite directly (and I can still use my appState singleton to let the rest of the app know when SQLite data has changed.)

Yesterday I spent probably 5-6 hours just trying to figure out how to navigate easily with react-navigation. There are probably over 100 questions on their issue list asking the same thing: How do you easily navigate between nested navigators? They all have the same setup: A StackNavigator that contains a TabNavigator that contains one or more StackNavigators. Nobody knows how to do it without redux and users that do use redux have other complaints. The react-navigation examples all show a `path:` property, but they don't just have a global service that you can use to navigate to all those paths. Instead (I think) you have to wrap all of your navigators and pass around the `navigation` property. When I tried following their example of passing down the navigation property, I just get errors.

I blame the people who tried to force their stupid functional programming ideology onto the whole framework.

[hungerstrike]

Just an update: I almost gave up on react-native today because the navigation story seemed so broken. I actually spent a few hours checking out Xamarin.Forms at one point. Then I took a break and I was about to play some Rocket League when I had a eureka moment - I finally understood the simplest way to make react-navigation work the way I needed it to and within an hour I had a working implementation!

(The trick that worked for me: Don't nest navigators directly within each other, instead wrap each one in a component class, get a ref to the wrapped navigator and then use that ref to handle navigation requests from a global navigation service that other components and services can use.)

So, my opinion of react-native has softened a bit this evening as I've gotten over my biggest hurdle yet. After trying Xamarin out and also comparing it with my previous Ionic/Cordova/PhoneGap experience...I'm glad to be back with react-native.

Also, Expo XDE has been a pleasure to work with - discovery of that tool is the reason I decided to re-investigate RN about 2 weeks ago. The first time I tried RN was like 6 months ago and I had spent a few days the first week just trying to get the environment working properly. This time everything just worked (and on multiple operating systems!)