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by rawrmaan 3047 days ago
Exact opposite experience. After being a mobile dev for 8+ years and making all of my most recent apps in RN, including a rewrite of one that was many years old, you're wasting your time if you still write native code instead of RN. It's just better in every single way and is an incredibly impressive, stable piece of technology.
4 comments
CodeWriter23 3047 days ago
I got just a taste of RN recently. The thing that stood out the most about it to me is being able to iterate through debug cycles at a much higher speed compared to native debugging.
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andrewingram 3047 days ago
You probably have an advantage coming from a native background. The main thing i've been battling when it comes to React Native is that to do things really well, you do need to be able to dive into native code from time-to-time. It's definitely true that you can write simple apps with just the React layer, but I think people greatly underestimate the amount of work it takes to build an app that actually feels native.
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solidr53 3047 days ago
It all comes down to the navigation. Use a native navigation, then you're good to go!

https://github.com/ueno-llc/react-native-starter

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ptx 3047 days ago
Can you make a native button in React Native yet? When I first tried it, there was no button component at all; later, they added a component[1] that emulates (almost correctly) the look and feel of a native button but is not actually native.

I tried to implement a native Android button component myself (i.e. hook it up[2] using Java code), but the problem I ran into was that for the button to compute its desired size, React Native wants to do the measurement step on the JS thread, before the actual button is created (so it can't be asked for its size). And the built-in components' implementation of measurement looked really complicated, so I gave up on it.

[1] https://facebook.github.io/react-native/docs/button.html

[2] https://facebook.github.io/react-native/docs/native-componen...

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rimliu 3046 days ago
I have 9 years experience developing for iOS and my take is completely opposite. If you know native SDK RN gives you nothing and takes a lot away.
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