[fingerlocks]

I have made a lucrative career by porting fragile, slow, bug-ridden react-naive disasters to native code bases. There is a lot of demand for this from startups that took the cross-platform shortcut and the MVP became the product.

[nwienert]

You can make a disaster in any framework. SwiftUI is a mess, for example, and slow.

React Native took a while to mature, but with the right tooling you can ship amazing UX now.

I don’t doubt there’s a ton of crap out there.

But you’re wrong if you think you can’t make seriously great stuff with it. It’s matured quite a lot.

And the React programming model is untouched, hot reloading and dev tools far ahead, and code share is worth it with something like Tamagui that actually optimizes to each platform. If I never had to touch an ObservableObject again that would be great.

[paperplatter]

It can get tough with the native dependencies involved.

[fingerlocks]

I have made a countless PRs to many of the most popular react-native dependencies because they were a buggy mess.

In fact at this very moment I’m helping a team fix a memory leak/crash in the “react-native-permissions” dependency. It’s obvious this package was not written by someone with experience. All it does is request permissions in a paragraph of code and it’s totally broken! Give me a break

[nwienert]

I have plenty of nightmare stories to tell you about native deps.

[paperplatter]

For some apps, I can see this. Question is, did the startups regret taking the shortcut upfront, or were they fine paying later for the improved version?

Btw, sometimes I think about how much I've been paid by various people to move a backend from SQL to NoSQL then from NoSQL to SQL, despite me telling them not to.

[nwienert]

Btw I don't think of it as a shortcut, I think it's actually the ideal end-state.

[cageface]

When I was still doing contract work I rescued a bunch of native code iOS app disasters. For most apps cross platform solutions are fine.