Is React Native still popular?

I think React Native is fantastic for getting out basic applications that may need camera, map, browser, and storage, etc capabilities. However, once you need more intricate functionality, I think it's best to write modules in Swift/(Kotlin/Java) and have your React Native UI communicate with your modules via the bridge.

I think React Native solves an organizational bandwidth issue. Building true native applications per platform will always outshine any results you get from React Native, both in performance and capability. However, if you have just a few developers, I think React Native is a practicable compromise.

Companies like Airbnb have the engineering bandwidth to develop bespoke platform specific applications, it's up to you and/or the company you work for to know what compromises can be made.

In my experience React Native has definitely "lost its luster", primarily because it occupies a bit of a weird middle ground that nobody wants:

1. If you truly need all the advantages of native performance and integration, just go native. Yes, you'll need to "write it twice", but you'll find that it's actually easier to hire top notch iOS or Android devs in the first place (in my experience they tend to be partisans) with high productivity.

2. I think the biggest thing that has changed since React Native first came on the scene is that the browser-based cross-platform toolkits, things like the Capacitor framework (and starting with Progressive Web Apps in the first place), have gotten much better, and browser tech now gives loads of access to underlying devices and sensors (accelerometer, cameras, biometrics, etc.) React Native really came out with the idea of "I've got all these web devs, can I make them productive on native mobile?" I think things like Capacitor and their ilk are a much better option for this issue now.

So in my opinion, if you really need native, use the native frameworks, but if your app doesn't need that and you can do cross-platform, use one of the web-view-based cross-platform frameworks.

It’s incredibly popular and imo has been having a bit of a resurgence as Meta has reinvested into it more heavily in the last couple years.

Evan Bacon does some tweets on it, but it’s one of the most popular libraries when you filter for top 100 apps in almost any category in the App Store.

If you want an active community and a bootstrap repo that is very robust, check out Tamagui (my project) which makes building universal native and web apps a breeze.

I'd say so, though after trying Expo (pretty much what most people use, FWIU) the experience can be... trying at times. I had a lot of dependency errors, weird errors which involved digging through issues to find (I believe Expo didn't support .tsx by default... what?)

This isn't coming from the usual "JavaScript is bad" crowd, but from someone who is generally quite favourable to JavaScript in general (while also recognizing its downsides). Overall, the experience is far from perfect, but I imagine you could make wonderful apps when you get the stack to work.

(In general, if there's one thing I can't stand, it's debugging toolchains and build systems. Extremely boring, frustrating and tedious.)

Yes it is still popular. Take a look at the showcase who is using it - Amazon was just added

Libraries have always been a unique problem to React Native. A lot of the time not maintained, and can be low quality too - like half baked re-implementations of existing native components, skipping the whole ‘native’ part

There’s not really another cross platform mobile framework in the same league. Flutter exists, and has its positives, but will never be an amazing experience on iOS. They don’t use native components, and the native components can access OS stuff not accessible by people other than Apple

Every tech has abandoned repos, especially popular ones.

As React Native matured in the past few years, the community developed improved solutions to common problems, and many older stop-gaps were rendered obsolete. Perhaps that's what you're seeing.

The only major competitor to React Native that I'm aware of is Flutter, but it has several drawbacks that make me hesitate to recommend it.

Discord's iOS and Android apps are built using React Native [1]. This enables business logic to be shared with the desktop and web clients, as well as shared UI components between both mobile apps.

Part of the reason you see abandoned repos is because the community has adopted libraries like Reanimated, React Native Gesture Handler, and React Navigation, which offer a lot of leverage to implement ambitious animations and native experiences in JS/TS.

React Native is mature enough to build big apps, and the community is active. It's still necessary to reach into Swift/Kotlin to implement some things, but for large apps that's not an unexpected lift. For cross platform JS/TS apps, no alternative offers the code sharing and delivery flexibility advantages of RN. I expect it'll remain relevant due to it's unique advantages and the community library stack will continue to mature.

[1] https://discord.com/blog/android-react-native-framework-upda...

Disclaimer: I wrote a book about creating apps, end-to-end, and I use Flutter https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38433668

It's the same thing with the Flutter ecosystem. Half of the libraries I use in my existing projects haven't been updated in a year (they were active when I picked them). They still work, but considering Flutter (and Dart) move so fast, it gives me the heebie-jeebies.

If you're comfortable with JS, go for it (React Native). But before you commit, think ahead of the must-have UIUX features for your app and build a PoC. Don't be surprised when you can use built-in/stock camera access in less than an hour, but you need hundreds of hours to make a custom camera screen.

I look online for Android programmer jobs, I see React Native often enough when someone is looking for an Android or mobile programmer.

It's a large skillset people want - you need to know Javascript, then probably some HTML and CSS, then the React framework. Enough to get you a job as a React JS programmer - but then you should know React Native as well. Plus, RN does not cover every case, so know the Android ecosystem (Kotlin and Android SDK, plus maybe some Java) and the iOS ecosystem (Swift and iOS SDK, plus maybe some Objective C). Most large companies tend to have a separate Android and iOS app, although not all (Discord is React Native IIRC).

It makes some sense in a startup possibly - have a few RN programmers and have one or two dive into RN and do Android and iOS apps for your product, some of it using your existing codebase. From all I have heard, it does not scale, although maybe companies like Discord make it work for their use case. Once a Series A or series B kicks in, engineering has to stop and look whether they want to continue adding on to this rickety future, or get a small Android and iOS team together and do native apps.

I’ve built a a couple apps in React Native over the past few years.

My reasoning for wanting to use React Native is primarily because I think the iOS ecosystem is a real mess right now. SwiftUI is not mature, and UIKit is antiquated compared to the needs of today. If you’re just starting out, the force multiplier you get from RN is almost too difficult to ignore.

1) Even in the last couple years, React Native has gotten much better. The performance gap is not noticeable anymore. In fact, in some cases I think it has been easier get better performance in RN than using native.

2) It does feel like there was a wave where tons of libraries were created and then abandoned. But overall there are lots of libraries which are good and well maintained.

3) Native is still better if you need really tight experiences, but this gap is also closing. Since you can easily drop down to native, this issue shouldn’t be a big deal.

Yes. Check out Expo. It's recommended by the React Native docs and it's very actively maintained/growing. Some big names are switching though. AirBnb has a few blog posts about switching to true native.

At Stream we used to hire for react native quite easily. Nowadays it's impossible to find experienced people who want to work with RN. Don't see that issue on Go, or any of our other SDKs. In case anyone is looking for a lead RN role remote EU or amsterdam: https://getstream.io/careers/job/5714344003/

I’d say it’s definitely got its merits. If you have a React web app built for desktop browsers, and you’ve cleanly separated your code so that the data layer of API calls, types, utilities, etc… is separate from the desktop UX layer, you suddenly have an awesome way to save time and money. You write the data layer, and then your desktop and mobile apps can all save a ton of duplicated work and maintenance and stay in sync with each other.

Most of the discussion I hear about React Native is that it's fine for the basics but very quickly ends up needing special code to handle all the platforms' various eccentricities. And then you have web-like latency that is kindof a turnoff compared to native apps.

I have heard people recommend Flutter recently, but I have even less knowledge about that than the anecdata I have about React Native.

I recently built a couple of apps in it and I found it to be great—I would recommend it, assuming that your app has similar functionality to a web app—text, images, data fields, fairly standard navigation (some of the more sophisticated interactive/canvas-based apps look a little trickier). The only issue I've stumbled across is that React Native added a new rendering engine recently, and some of the animation libraries need updating to work with it (but, that work seems under way). In general, it was straightforward to work with, I found working libraries for pretty much everything I wanted, and I had a nice little iOS app with swiping, infinite scrolling with lazy loading, pull-to-refresh, streaming audio, native icons, popup sheets, and supabase integration, working in under a week.

Github open source projects are not at all an indicator of "popularity". There are vast amount RN apps on the appstores and closed source.

As someone who has tried most of the options for streaming realtime mobile app, I landed on RN/EXPO for the sole reason of community size and ease of use. Basically everything is possible!

Typical recommendation has been to build MVPs in RN and then switch to native after your raise funds, but strongly advise against it unless the nature of your app demands native implementation. You can stick with RN all the way to FB/Instagram scale!

Anecdote here:

Recently I started working on an mobile application as a personal project. It involves scraping web pages and generating ebooks from them with an inbuilt reader with visual controls.

I’d never worked with Swift or UIKit previously and I’ve worked professionally with React for a few years so I considered using React Native.

100s of abandoned repos, janky build tooling, a and a weird split with something called expo caused me to avoid React Native altogether and I’ve been happily learning SwiftUI and UIKit.

All these react haters here are just scared of losing their jobs. I love it I can build what I want easily with RN. I know that I sound stupid but that's the reality

From what I’ve seen in the corporate world, it’s the overwhelming default. The business simply will not pay for separate native iOS & Android apps, even if you present convincing evidence that it’s better, faster and cheaper.

It’s not the worst thing in the world, but React Native makes your entire app feel kind of janky and clunky. It’s frustrating when something as simple as a push transition looks and works 1000X better with a few lines of SwiftUI.

You might be interested in Jebtrains' Kotlin Compose Multiplatform, which lets you cross-compile to native UI in iOS, android, and others - and pretty smoothly interop with native iOS code (especially UI code).

https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/compose-multiplatform/

I think it's new, and I haven't tried it myself.

I'd say yes, I'm seeing big consumer companies switch to it from native these days.

If you're just getting started I highly recommend expo. I wrote an article on building a game using it over say unity not too long ago https://parrisneeds.coffee/posts/making-a-game-in-react-nati...

I've really enjoyed using Hyperview (https://hyperview.org/) recently, which uses React Native as a base. I used to think PWA/Ionic/Capacitor apps were better, but have really fallen in love with the simplicity of Hyperview and tools like HTMX.

React Native has been great. Until recently, updating old versions of React Native had been a real challenge though. The complexity all comes from the native layer bits though.

A lot of SaaS providers offer React Native components that are ready to go, even newish startups. The ecosystem feels strong and it's way more economical than writing two separate apps.

I picked up React Native and Expo last year for a medium-sized hobby project and found it a better experience than when I developed a Flutter app three years ago. I have always heard the React Native dependencies were a mess, but I did not have that experience. Things were stable and Expo has pretty good documentation.

My thinking on this: Avoid React Native if at all possible.

You want a primarily information-oriented software, without lots of manipulation/interaction, then go with Webview based solutions (capacitor + react).

You want performant manipulation/interactive software, go native.

AFAIK Microsoft built the latest Office on top of it.

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/react-native/2023-09-08-rneu-...

Expo has taken over the react-native scene - look at the libraries they use and you will find them pretty active.

The expo approach to generating the native projects is just better than the OOB react-native stuff which makes upgrades extremely tedious.

Not much anymore, React Native isn't really a better way to develop apps. It is as complex as developing native apps and as you mentioned, the libraries aren't good enough/well maintained.

I tried RN and Flutter and I liked Flutter more.

Very. But a lot of packages I think have been abandoned in favour of those built by Expo.

Check out Expo, that's probably the most active React Native project.

I'd say yes, although somewhat through Expo nowadays

What about Flutter?

Good, that means its slowly getting stable!