[tylerchurch]

As someone who has deployed projects to the App Store/Play Store in both React Native and Ionic for my day job - Ionic is a breath of fresh air compared to React Native.

Ionic+Capacitor delivers on the promise to leverage existing web development knowledge to build mobile apps.

React Native somewhat delivers on the promise. But the whole ecosystem loves breaking changes, and debuggability is a nightmare. There are more libraries for native libraries, but the headache of actually integrating them is significant.

Capacitor, in comparison, seems very well designed. Where web tech stops and native tech starts is very clear.

[mattnewton]

I have only just started working with react native, but I will say the new expo development workflow is pretty great.

[tylerchurch]

Expo makes React Native fairly tolerable. Just don't go outside the guardrails, there lies pain.

[zo1]

Expo is a huge bait and switch that makes it hard to fix down the line. It's all rainbows, butterflies and QR codes at first, until something goes wrong or you outgrow expo. Then you're in the 5th circle of hell where you've coupled half your app to expo and need Java, gradle, and IOS experts to fix it.

Next project I have to do on mobile it'll be React native all the way from the start.

[dbetteridge]

Yep was going to say this, Want to use a library that is too low level for expo support? Tough! you eject from Expo and now you have to do the low level RN stuff for everything and not just that library.

[mattnewton]

We haven’t had to fully eject with the dev builds - Have you hit the limits of that new(er) workflow? We have lots of packages not available in expo go (and a few that required some config finagling) https://docs.expo.dev/development/create-development-builds

[dbetteridge]

Good tip, I'll have to investigate again as it's been a while since our last check in.