I sympathize with cross-platform development woes (we have this problem too) but I can't say I've ever been impressed with a cross-platform app developed using React Native (or anything else cross-platform).<p>A React Native app isn't horrible or bad (nothing like Java Swing) but it also isn't delightful to use. Technically you have animations and things like the cross-platform navigator. In reality, you have a lot of performance issues and strange incompatibilities due to attempting to execute animation keyframes on the JS thread (or replace the system-provided navigation bar in the case of Navigator). It isn't terribly easy on battery life either.<p>I'd rather write my sync and offline storage system in JS and share that across platforms while leaving the entire view layer as native code. That stuff is far harder to get right for non-trivial apps, it just isn't sexy and most web devs ignore it completely because hey - the web browser is always online!<p>I'm biased though. Our customers download 5-10 GB projects with millions of objects in them because when you're building a hospital the MRI room is a literal faraday cage. No such thing as internet access in there and telling the user they can't pull up plans or engineering specs because they're offline is a non-starter.
Here's a bit about my experience with React Native.<p>I've been using React Native on iOS in production since last November for <a href="http://townske.com/app" rel="nofollow">http://townske.com/app</a>,<p>Over that period, I did hit some performance issues, but the vast majority of those were implementation flaws (i.e. my fault), not framework flaws. Real user feedback has been overwhelmingly positive, including being featured in the app store multiple times.<p>I just launched another app for iOS and Android last weekend (<a href="https://curbitapp.com" rel="nofollow">https://curbitapp.com</a>) that was built with React Native in a few weeks, and shares about 80% of the codebase. I haven't spent any time optimising these apps for performance, other than following standard react best practices and see sufficient performance on both iOS and Android.<p>For someone who has a web background, React Native is a no brainer. 60fps native UI is generally attainable, you can use the exact same tooling (good dev tools, hot reloading), and you have the ability to pick up a large chunk of your code and put it on Android, or web, or now potentially OSX.
As someone who quite likes Qt, why should I prefer this over Qt5+QML? This whole React Native thing just feels like "let's reinvent Qt but slower and much less mature".<p>Note: I really don't mean this in an inflammatory way; it just feels like people are rediscovering the cool stuff about Qt and reimplementing it but worse.
Maybe it's just me, but as an C++, Objective-C and Swift programmer, React Native doesn't really appeal to me that much.<p>At least on the iOS and Mac, I don't really want to give up on Swift in favor of Javascript.<p>I like React on the web. In my view, conceptually it's the most interesting framework out there and that's saying a lot, given the jungle of JS frameworks populating the web.<p>But I also like UIKit and the other native frameworks, now that I've spent so much time learning to use them right.<p>I'll give it a try anyway, I'm sure there's something to like about it and probably something to learn too..
I'm in love with React Native. We're delivering the Android & iOS application we've been working on for the last three months this week, and it's been a phenomenal experience. Far more stable, and far more powerful than I expected going in to it; combined with Redux (though react-redux needed npm 3 and some tweaks to get it working due to name collisions under the packager) we built out a real cross platform app faster than I ever though possible.<p>Applying that to native desktop application development has me so excited its not even funny!
Reminds me of "Facebook will eat everything with React Native" - <a href="https://www.quora.com/What-is-mobile-development-going-to-look-like-in-2-5-years/answer/Jeff-Meyerson?srid=pvSi" rel="nofollow">https://www.quora.com/What-is-mobile-development-going-to-lo...</a>
Anyone aware of anything similar for Universal Windows Platform? That would seem like another logical extension to the existing Android/iOS targets.
I'm a bit confused by this. I thought the entire point of making things "native" was that the app would feel like it belongs on the platform. Native interfaces have certain details that might not be immediately noticeable, but that massively improve the experience.<p>This... does not. The screenshots look like webapps that try hard to look native, despite actually being native.<p>The text in the top-left textbox in the first and second screenshots looks weird, because its baseline is too high. The box around it in the second screenshot has weird corners, etc.<p>Now, I'm not an OSX user, but with all the talk about OSX having the most polished interface, I highly doubt weird things like this are common.
Did "Building MacOS apps with JavaScript" ever get any traction?<p><a href="http://tylergaw.com/articles/building-osx-apps-with-js" rel="nofollow">http://tylergaw.com/articles/building-osx-apps-with-js</a>
And - for windows <a href="https://github.com/joemcbride/react-native-wpf" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/joemcbride/react-native-wpf</a>
There seems to be some common misconceptions about the technology behind both React and FRP, and unfortunately this is compounded by the fact that FB called it "React" when it is not technically using reactive technology or functional reactive programming. I'd love to hear from any experts on the matter what the key technical distinctions are between React and FRP and where Qt's QML, which is declarative and reactive, fits into this picture in comparison. I've recently skimmed several papers on general reactive programming, and many of them cite QML in their examples, while none of them mentioned React -- perhaps because React is newer. In any case, these are interesting paradigms that could use some dumbed-down explanations.
Oh good, another was to half-ass port things to Mac. Lovely. There's a reason people like native interfaces.<p>"No it's not like Java this time!" "It's not like Carbon!" "It's not Flash!" "Don't worry, it's no X11!"<p>If you care about the platform, go native. Learn the rules and look and feel. If you don't care that much? Maybe you should reconsider the port. You can't "click this checkbox for OS X", it doesn't feel right.
I am less interested that is "looks" like everything else as long as it "works" like everything else and does what I want it to do.
When you think about it, using react with electron is kinda like react-native for cross-browsers. It'll be hilarious when someone writes a wrapper that let's you do cross browser with react<p>Let me know if you guys know of one
Really loving simplicity of react on a desktop. It is possible to do with electron, this is more versatile.<p>I have a sense that there should be more versatile components for desktop, I guess once it takes off, there will be those.<p>Thank you.
Interesting to have the same chronology of ecosystem hacks that iOS had: Fully Native --> Wrap JS app in WebView [0] --> React Native<p>[0] - E.g., PhoneGap apps on iOS & Slack app on OSX
This is pretty awesome. They're really proving that you can learn once build anywhere.<p>For OS X though if I were to get into a project I'd go the Electron route.
I don't use or develop for OS X, but I know it has a reputation for some pretty bad desktop applications. Do people think React Native might lower the barrier enough to improve on this problem? Thinking of getting a Mac soon and am curious.