Please provide your opinion on the state of React Native in 2023

Its day and night difference compared to 3 years ago (internally), but situation with libraries is still pretty much same: they die off randomly and you have to search a new solution, spending your time. Expo's stuff is mostly good and well maintained, thats something.

I use it, mostly with expo. Everything works out of the box and performance is actually surprising (because of Hermes engine), I'd say its a lot better than all other alternatives when it comes to cross platform development solution, simply because flutter is the only real competitor and flutter has few problems that makes it unbearable for me:

1) lots of copy-paste boilerplate code 2) ios apps behave weirdly in flutter (maybe they still havent fixed 1 frame lag with touch/swipe/scroll events? idk) 3) they're not using native components but implementing them on canvas. This sounds extremely prone to issues and bugs and requires them to catch up to update stuff once platform holders change something in their UI kits.

If I had to pick a tech right now, I'd go

React Native -> Jetpack Compose/Swift UI -> Flutter -> Anything else

If you are writing a gui to a REST endpoint, it’s fine.

If you are writing a B2B app where the customer wants to forcibly install it on people’s personal phones, the cross platform is important.

In most other cases, just write it in swift, 95% of profitable customers have iphones.

Use Expo. Ignore anything that ever mentions having to "eject" because that's the giveaway that the information is hopelessly, uselessly out of date. It's fine.

I hate mobile app dev, but Flutter makes it fun. It's very quick to iterate with real-time hot rebuiling of widgets, and the built-in widget set is flexible and robust.

I'd be wary of using it for a really large project though, because of a) Dart and b) Google so it might die in the future. It also changes a lot, so be prepared for dev time if you're only updating the app every year or so.

It’s still worth the trade-offs vs developing for multiple platforms, but the experience continues to be incredibly painful.

Libraries that handle basic features like geolocation or the clipboard have been spun out of the main org, and the result is even worse reliability. Core features are also often superseded by libraries that are in a constant state of refactoring like Reanimated or React Router.

On the bright side, performance, memory usage and startup times have steadily improved so it’s possible to build apps that perform almost indistinguishably from native ones (at great human cost!).

FYI Software Mansion ran a React-Native survey last year with almost 2000 answers.

Here are the results: https://results.stateofreactnative.com/

My personal biased opinion: React-Native is awesome and keeps improving.

My experience with RN 2 years ago was that despite the usual headaches, it's a lot easier than dealing with native apps for most use cases. This was after years of doing native iOS apps.

imo it depends on what you are building. if simple crud, react native, flutter, and expo can let you build things quickly for multiple platforms.

sometimes you have to go native if you need it.

personally i despise mobile stuff. i find it hard to catch up on yearly changes compared to building web apps.

but there are people who got rich in buildig mobile apps. there is money there. i just dont love the developer experience.

We use it without many issues, but you need to implement native modules if you have to use device peripherals for some scenarios, e.g. IoT pairing via wifi or some bluetooth stuff.

Sure sometimes it can be frustrating, but to me is ok if your company is small and can't hire too many people in order to maintain two fully native projects.

Another vote from an Expo user.

Having no previous experience with RN, I wrote and released an iOS and Android app using Expo and their free hosted build system.

Yes it has some quirks and you should ensure plugins/modules can provide the functionality you need, but for me, from 0 to 100 (app idea to app store) it was easy.

I understand your past concerns with React Native. It has improved since then, but checking recent updates is wise. For alternatives, consider Flutter for performance or NativeScript for native app development using JavaScript/TypeScript. If needed, you can hire NativeScript developers.

For more info: Visit: https://www.technbrains.com/mobile-application/nativescript-... Email: contact@technbrains.com Call: (401) 264-0670

Expo always if you want something akin to web apps in features, with a few extra. Go native (swift, kotlin) if you want something that should be a mobile app.

I use it with Expo, no real complaints from me.

What would be a good current React Native book to read in order to get up to speed right now?