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by hungerstrike 3230 days ago
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!)