[jfisk87]

Long story short, terrible idea unless you're in a position like coinbase.

The article is from a high level engineering standpoint about productivity and trying to be efficient. The thing the article doesn't mention is the best react native developer also is an expert in native mobile development. It is crazy hard finding these people.

All techno fluff aside, any component mobile developer knows once you have a solid foundation it is super easy to build on core features. Given how frequently aplkenabd google breaks things which makes reactive native upgrades a mega PITA, the only proper use at a technical level is to utilize the code at a framework level. React native is still on its knees to cocoapods, which as of now is virtually nonpreferred for future projects.

Sorry for the rant, I just think A.:) Coinbase made the wrong decision in the long run because they limited themselves on a technologist that's infamously know to not favor solid user experiences

B:) they underestimated the specific qualifications they need to get the people that are grounded enough to know native mobile development and its capabilities, abs the react native component. Even though they are coinbase the article acts like it doesn't matter.

[_fat_santa]

I highly disagree that an expert RN dev also needs to be an expert mobile dev. Articles like these make it seem that react native development requires native knowledge but that simply isn’t the case. With almost all greenfield RN apps, 99.9% of the code is RN and only very specific feature are helped out by native code.

[Jare]

You don't need to be an expert in native to write a RN app. However, you need to be very capable in native to have a responsive, performant, smooth RN app, and to keep it that way for years.

Large teams can afford to have a subset of platform devs and a large body of RN app devs to make this plan work (note: you now have 3 platforms: iOS, Android, and RN itself). Smaller teams will struggle. Most often, small teams will end up putting their weight on the RN side (develop new features!), and slowly slide downhill in performance, responsiveness and overall UX like the proverbial boiling frog.

[seanalltogether]

> Large teams can afford to have a subset of platform devs and a large body of RN app devs to make this plan work

This has been my experience as well. I work on an app that supports multiple generations of iot products. We were forced to start developing for the next gen product in react native, and let the legacy stuff just use the exiting ios and android codebases. We made it about 9 months before throwing out the react native work and porting it all back to native. Management doesn't realize that moving to react native doesn't mean you now only have to support 1 platform, it means you're now supporting 3.

[robertlagrant]

This is where Kotlin Multiplatform works well - you only need Android/Kotlin, and iOS/Swift skills. You save money where you can (e.g. shared code to do API calls / auth / calculations / etc etc) and still get the best-quality apps from the native code you're still writing.

[namelosw]

> the best react native developer also is an expert in native mobile development.

It's not that bad. All they need is at least 1 iOS expert and 1 Android expert in the team.

> infamously know to not favor solid user experiences

I don't think that's necessarily the case. Discord is doing fine for me. Most of the apps don't need such high performance as video games.

People always rant about React Native and Electron. The reality those techs are just scapegoats because most of the companies chose them because they want to build something cheap. If they use the same budget to build the same set of functionalities using native technologies for each platform, the outcome could mostly be even worse.

[abacadaba]

Web developers, no prior mobile experience, we launched a RN app just fine with minimal outside assistance. It did take some problem solving / trial and error at times dealing with, e.g. cocoapods issues though, yes.

[grensley]

The AndroidX transition breaking basically everything was worse than everything Apple did combined in my opinion. That was such a massive and messy headache.

[600frogs]

Fun fact - your new word "aplkenabd" is a one-hit wonder on Google! What was it meant to say?

[pindab0ter]

“Apple and”. Probably written (a bit too) fast on a phone without reading it back before hitting ‘reply’.