I think about this article a lot...
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- čas přidán 4. 07. 2023
- It's no secret that I'm a React Native fan. It's truly a shame that this AirBNB article will be cited as reason to not use it for the rest of time. Mobile devs deserve better.
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S/O Ph4seOne for the awesome edit 🙏 - Věda a technologie
Expo doesn’t get nearly as much recognition as it deserves
Expo has spent so much of its time catching up to the rest of the mobile dev ecosystem. There is nothing expo or react native helps you archive thats makes its better to use expo or react native. React native and react look nothing alike from an advanced point of view. The technology needs a vision for developers to back it
The 25MB Hello World app memes don’t help with that
It got A LOT better over time
Yh
Expo is great 😃😃
@@owenwexler7214 man you gotta be a really shit mobile dev if you take that meme seriously
Expo got a lot of hate, even back in 2018 when I started doing React. Apparently it's always those "native" guys. I love expo, always been an expo fan, always love how they think of their plugins, and how they listen about their users. I'm surprised they don't cost $299 annually to use.
Thanks theo, I really dislike expo haters. This shit is too free.
Why was all the hate?
@@runonce pick one: expo is not as good as react native, you can't do as many things with expo, react native is bad, js is bad
Expo improved dramatically over recent years. We re-evaluated Expo and started using it around 2021, and it has been immensely valuable to us since then. Previously, we had evaluated it around 2018-ish and found that at that time it was too buggy to use (e.g. crashes in development mode). React-Native itself also got a lot more stable over that kind of timeframe too.
This is a very good rant. Constructive, with actual arguments, critical but to the point. Must be nice to have a voice to put this out and reach the amount of people you do. Thank for sharing!
Amen 🙏 🤓
I Agree++
I used to write apps with Cordova, they had the same idea that Expo+RN does but without assuming a framework and letting the render happen in a webview. Worked fine, and even back like 7-9 years ago it was fast enough that most devices had a native-like experience if you knew how to build a good SPA. React Native as far as I've been playing with is the next level where you are delivering a native experience where your domain logic can remain the good old JS level that pretty much everyone understands.
I've spent the last year ish in React Native/Expo. It is crazy how much it does with what seems like such minimal effort because it usually just works everywhere. Expo is a game changer though, from handling submitting to platforms with EAS to their new Expo Router. Expo Router is still super early but I think it's a really good shift.
The new architecture is awesome.
Turbo Modules, Fabric, and the Codegen.
I hope there is more excitement on react native.
Having spent the last 2 weeks working on a side project using RN, I can vouch that using it was a really nice and streamlined experience. A pet peeve of mine is the declarative nature of design in native android development. Being able to use tailwind css to design your app is SUCH a underrated benefit. Apart from that the ability to take the majority of stuff you know from React and being able to port it to RN is another plus as well.
The only things I don't like are: poor documentation. Maybe I'm going into it expecting too much after I've used the new React docs, but either way the RN docs, especially the ones on expo router are not good. While the content and details might be there, they are not structed in a good way at all. You continuously have to jump back and forth between 3 to 4 websites to do basic stuff like add a new screen with a tab icon at the bottom.
You should be happy tho, I'm to stupid to even understand the toolchain and actually get a project going. So, even if the docs are bad, at least you're smart enough to work around it!
wait tailwind for RN? didn't know that worked
I am with you the docs are the worst part of using RN
Damn didnt knew we could use tailwind in react native
Engineers always push hard to change directions and invest on new apps because they're too bored. this is crazy lol.
Tobi's luke tweet summarises it up
Expo has gotten really amazing in the past couple years. I came back to it a couple months ago and was blown away by the progress they've made. Not using it seems crazy now!
After working for years in React Native. I would be cautious to recommend it, it has some insane benefits like OTA updates, despite that you can make pretty much anything in RN and make it look good, RN unfortunately because of how it works makes it really easy to built janky uis. And your experience as React dev working with animations will hardly translate to RN, so that’s going to be another challenge.
Every update cycle is hell, working with monorepos is still ass, native modules debugging is bad. In order to install package for it to work you better use expo as your package manager layer because it knows better than pnpm what’s best.
There are a lot of challenges with RN, a lot of pains and things that will make your hair gray. But if you need delivery speed in hours not days RN is a good choice
I have shipped 7 production apps and the only pain with react-native is upgrading and it has gotten a lot better.
@@walterlolfinally some good review, for each good review i see 1000 bad ones, i dont know what it is that people hate about it( im mot s RN dev tho)
@@walterlol forget React Native bro and use Flutter instead. React Native is very2 sucks mobile framework as well as React Js a very2 bad for web development.
I was put off from using RN by that Airbnb post, but thanks to a tight deadline, I had to still go with RN as it was using some concepts and tools I’m already familiar with from the web. The DX with bare RN setup was a bit of a headache, but I was able to get through it all, nowadays I’d go with Expo by default as it’s matured a lot! With Flutter, you don’t really know when big G is going to rug pull it, they kind of ditched everything to build a whole new ecosystem for Fuchsia and who knows how that will go? Seems like an unsafe bet.
Fuchsia uses Flutter .. 🤦🏻♂️ And they are investing A LOT in flutter. All their apps are being made with it
you're clearly ignorant to what flutter is doing so I'd recommend you to either look into it or not share wrong information
@@danvilela Yes, Flutter is a first-class citizen on Fuchsia and will benefit from it! But, It doesn't matter unless their new OS ever becomes a reality and gets mass adoption, and given Google's history on how they manage projects, they'll probably not shy away from throwing it all if it doesn't work out. All this seems like an unnecessary reinventing of the wheel by shifting in a new direction with Fuchsia.
@@zeroww7i don't think so. They would sink bmw, at least 5 banks, government apps and thousand other big companies with it. The most probable option when google stop being interested in flutter would be to create flutter foundation and split the bill with other companies.
This is an awesome video! Thank you for sorting these opinions out... they are hard to deal with sometimes when you're called out for using React...
Expo's development-client lets you avoid ejecting and is pretty cool but since it's kind of new, you don't see many tutorials. Spent the past few months using it and I got a lot accomplished.
Devs: Don't like a certain piece of software
Theo: Misunderstoooood!
JavaScript or React is not the reason I don't like RN.
I don't like it comparing it with Flutter because of the performance and UI kit isn't as good in RN.
Although I like Expo but the size of the app increases significantly
he is right tho, 80% of those devs liked it and 70% would try RN in other projects
its people who wants to see problem
RN styling sucks so much. Css in js crap. Can’t do it
@@danvilela cant you use modules like React?
@@yt-sh I'm not sure if you can but RN in my opinion should at least provide the basic components like button, drop-down etc etc in material and Cupertino. To have a something as a button wrapping it in TouchableOpacity makes the UX very bad. There are no native components we have to build all of it on our own.
Unlike Flutter that provides all components. Idk about ios but with Android at least we have all the basic components
A lot of apps can be made in webview with no issues. Text, forms, images, simple animations, no one will see a difference between web and native framework. Even if you need more native apis you can use adapters to expose it to web.
Damn, I remember reading this article 6 years ago
Boom you hit this on the nail! Awesome job!!
Thanks for this. I'm starting building an app in React Native.. it's a bit of a headache, there's far less training for Native and what is there is not that great. Then when you find one, the dependencies aren't up to date and raise a ton of errors.. I shall push on!
Expo 49 is already in beta and should come out this week, maybe next week 😊
it is out now
I got the point. I got new guy in my office said to don't use lodash since there is some article said it not good because of build size. then I read more about lodash found out it already has a way to optimize it.
I am not a fan of flutter, but holy crap was working with RN a pita a lot of times. From unsolvable performance issues, to weird page transitions to build tooling that breaks on every minor update. It all felt flaky as hell. I haven't worked with RN for about a year now, but I definitely wouldnt' want to. RN probably once was a really great and innovative thing (and maybe it has moved and is that again), but flutter to me seemed a lot more stable. It's a bit like moving from electron to tauri. (though I love Tauri and just find flutter ok...)
Theo is glossing over the many rough edges. I'm not sure if I would or wouldn't use it again. It has benefits but it also, as you point out, constantly feels janky and half-baked.
🙌🏽 glad you mentioned this and React’s changes mainly being for RN. I think that’s been my biggest gripe in FE development. A lot of these “wars” don’t even know the ethos of the codebase. React’s changes for nearly now a decade was to make react a platform agnostic language where it doesn’t matter where the view is, if you know react, you could build on it. Glad you also shredded the airbnb article that no one who shares it clearly reads and elated you highlighted the lords work the expo team has been doing to move RN to be a best-in-class tool.
I would only consider RN or Capacitor for any mobile projects these days.
just show them the top 500 non gaming apps on the app stores and you'll see that most of them is built using react native.
I may eventually get to native IOS or Android development but Expo has been such a supercharger. The introduction of config plugins makes Expo a great choice 99% of the time.
I remember starting to work with React Native with Android Studio and stuff many years ago and it was soo cumbersome that I quitted. Then I found about Astro and it looked like it improved the DX a lot but I never tried to get into React Native again but I would def go with it again if I need to.
BlueSky is built with React Native, and the pace they're pushing out updates and moving forward is pretty amazing!
I haven’t seen any updates…. It’s same white invite wall 😢
@@hanes2 my friend has the same issue and I have no idea why. I’m sorry that’s happening
Expo is straight up wizardry. I can not recommend it enough!
I would like to see Theo compare React Native to Ionic React, since I don’t see many people talking about Ionic although they dropped Cordoba and are now using Capacitor
I suddenly felt dejavu watching this video. Was there some similar video on the channel or it's just The Matrix is weird? :D
I'm a laravel and javascript dev for almost seven years and this is my first time using react and react native and it's really good especially with expo cli
May I know why "mobile development" is less adopted every year? I'm a full stack web dev and I'm trying to expand my knowledge into mobile app development, I really interested in React Native but seem like there might not be as much career opportunity as I might expected
Isn't that the opposite of what is happening though? More and more of our consumption of the internet is going to mobile apps.
@@wezter96 That's what I thought at first too, but the Stack Overflow survey for 2023 showed that mobile dev accounts for only ~3.5% of all occupations, and there are very few vacant mobile dev roles in my local area too (the reason might be that all new junior developers tend to learn Flutter). Theo's wording seems to align with what I suspected, but I'm also not sure why
@@wezter96 Really? Now that iOS supports push notifications on PWA? Not really a need to have a mobile app in my opinion
@@timothycurtis5694 Stackoverflow is not a good representation of the population at large. There are those demographics that tend to use it a lot while others rarely ever use it.
Looking for actual job ads as you have with your local area makes a lot more sense.
afaict there's been a slight decline in ios/android dev postings but I expect this would be due to flutter/RN cannibalisation from when I last looked. Jobs are still there though they'll always be dwarfed by the web dev market.
@@timothycurtis5694 stack overflow survey is a really poor representation and companies have way more websites than mobile apps. B2B web is still the main platform but B2C mobile seems to be where it is trending. If you know RN you also know React and will often work with both web and mobile.
While I've used RN and really liked it, I think it's too easy to work with. For example, my university mobile app uses it and it's a MESS, things are flashing on the screen, sometimes it will log you out for no good reason, the app is slow, and the list goes on. It feels like the developers just wanted to ship as fast as they could without thinking if that was the best solution to the problem, and now we have a pile of code that is barely hanging together.
We use React Native for our app Solo. It’s been great for us to build quickly and deliver OTA updates. I doubt most people would know it’s not a “native app” and we’ve done barely any optimisation.
interesting video, but theo, did you not read that one article that airbnb wrote about react native?
I'm a full time RN developer and with our team we ejected the app from expo 4-5 months ago and it became much faster and flexible to use. Though there were a few expo plugins that could have made some tasks a bit easier but it's definitely not worth moving to expo
same
When i start learning SwiftUI i feel it like React Native, just with the difference that is strongly typed and somethings are more tricky to reproduce like Ref
Hey, first impression of the vid (5 seconds in): nice audio processing, feelin’ crisp!
Thank you for your service!!!! I hated this article when it was written!!!!
I don't do much frontend but the way you've described it has me thinking React Native makes JS to native APIs like Python is to C libs with Numpy & friends
Great video. This sunsetting react native article, is like the one an amazon employee wrote recently about serverless not being that great. His article speaks about the monolithic approach being better. Clearly for the amazon prime video encoding. But sadly the article just gives off vibes of amazon cussing its own products.
I know you’re Mr. React, but got any thoughts on Vue and Nativescript and how it compares to React Native?
Never had a problem with react native and I’ve built iOS apps in objective C and react native.
I still hear this article cited even today. Says a lot about today's developers :)
The resulting binary of react native is huge, that’s the reason I skipped react native. Flutter on the other hand comes close to swift/kotlin built app.
I was an Android and iOS dev using Java/ObjC, for me it’s more interesting to choose Flutter. React Native just doesn’t feel out of the box.
This video totally changed my view of React Native. Thanks!
After reading their post I would’ve thought the main downside that was just about their organization was first render time. But I don’t know anything about it. So what they say about it not being ok for initial start screens and deep links isn’t valid anymore ? Can you point me to interesting ressources on those topics ?
I needed to hear this today.
100% with you. Great Work. Amazing!!!
isn't expo team already get funding? they starting to make expo web which I think if it success then it will be game changer. we will move to react-native fully to build everything
Interesting to see. Perfect timing as I'm looking to build a new mobile app.
around 7mins mark - he said mobile app are less adaptive .. what does it mean? is there any data supporting that?
I have very conflicting feelings for React Native. I want to use it more, but at the same time I don't. I think it has more to do with the hellscape of a codebase that I've inherited rather than React Native itself though.
I would not be surprised if more companies will drop React Native and go full on native or start using Compose Multiplatform / KMM due to it's ability to easily bridge native stuff with Compose/KMM
I was exited about kotlin multiplatform in… 2018. Still, they were not been able to do a significant move since then. Do you know any big app written in it?
Kmm is a dead project. Not maintained, Noone to ask how to make it work.
Bridging is way easier in flutter btw. You can even write all your logic in rust if you like.
@@adriankal I would agree that flutter’s ecosystem is bigger, however the documentation for KMM is there and their expect/actual mechanism is just beautiful. It makes it much easier to bridge native and non-native stuff. The biggest problem of flutter is actually dart. The language just looks like a mess of java/js/python. UI structure look just about unreadable. However I still believe that flutter is better then react native.
react native, expo, ionic... i've tried all of them multiple times and i've always had an endless amount of different errors that lead me to give up on those tools.
Thank you for supporting react native btw
I'm glad Airbnb wrote this article, because then I learned Swift and it's my favorite lang
I remember that article. I bet they regret it now.
Can someone quickly explain why I would choose React Native over Flutter? Take React familiarity away. Assume I know nothing about both Flutter and React. I have to learn both from the start. Would you still recommend React Native over Flutter, and why?
When writing flutter components, it is very hard to abstract away business logic from the interactivity of widgets (components) on the screen.
I get PTSD every time you mention AirBnB lint rules.
Since i dont like react i will talk from the experience of a vue dev. When i have to go mobile (or desktop app), i choose PWA. Is not as limiting as people think. We now have Push on IOS, web apis to tap into hardware are really powerful and people most of the time dont grasp that javascript can actually do alot of stuff with external hardware from a web context without relying on calling native functions written in java/swift. The only thing that is a grunge for me is that is harder to develope an app that works on a desktop browser and also make it feel native when is viewed from a mobile screen (capacitor or framework7 help alot here). So yeah. I am pleased and my clients are pleased too
... says the ReactNative dev ...
What's your take on Ionic and Capacitor? Do you think it's a good alternative to React Native?
At this point both are dead in progress. With the development of PWAs launching in the fall for the Apple ecosystem, and both not getting the cycle attention like RN or even flutter does, you’ll be beta testing a lot of packages and hoping they remain up to date
@@theklr Well I guess Capacitor still helps getting your PWA into the stores to ship it as an app.
So when do you go for a PWA or Capacitor app over RN? What benefit does RN even have if you could just ship your web app and be even faster?
@@Simi3x couple things like battery info and file storage, particularly for Apple, if you need more state maintenance. However for like 65% of the apps, PWA will cover the needs
@@theklr both of those utilities also work with capacitor. Performance is also pretty tied, so I really don't get the hype around RN. To me, it seems more cluttered with less control, like capacitor gives you the full web capabilities. Well not on iOS because safari sucks, but that's another story.
I defently think that the 20% are properly people that had the hard tasks like optimizing or doing things you probley shouldn't
But what about embedded systems and desktop
support seems limited.
Wasn't this streamed months ago?
I hope there will be SvelteNative soon
There won’t be - Svelte is built heavily in browser standards.
Great takes on the cultural friction. Native mobile dev is full of engineers who want to work on frontend but hate JavaScript. I'm sure many of the mobile engineers joined AirBnB specifically because they have a strong pedigree of native mobile development (e.g. Lottie).
Kinda besides the point, but I've got to admit I actually enjoyed their linting rules as a beginner, I learnt a lot from trying to understand them. But yeah, most of my junior colleagues back then just felt suffocated.
also airbnb is in a big mess, not going to listen to them at this point.
Is anything going on in Android? Yeah, Jetpack Compose is one of the best DX and performant UI frameworks available right now. It's development philosophy is based on modern React, hooks, and function components. There's actually a blogger who made a dictionary been React Native APIs and Jetpack Compose APIs and there's a comparable API for every single paradigm.
It's fantastic and comparably makes SwiftUI look clunky af.
It's like you absolutely never wrote anything beyond 3 screen app on mobile. React Native is nightmare to maintain. I had 3 projects written in n where the cost of upgrading app to new version of RN costed more than rewriting the whole app to flutter.
Aditionaly Apps in flutter are safer, have order of magnitude less bugs, you have ability to create UI on a pixel level, platform integration is done properly etc.
There is no case for react native. Even if your team is 100% js devs it's easier for them to learn dart and flutter than learn react native alone.
The only source of popularity of React Native is the popularity of React as a web framework and Javascript as a language. The main downside of Flutter on the other hand is the new language that you need to learn - Dart. Other than that Flutter is much better than RN in almost all regards. I tried them both. Flutter is just better on so many levels. But I understand that there is so many React/JS guys and they naturally gravitate towards RN.
What about user experience ( speed )
What do you think about LiveView Native?
react native is great just that debugging is really hell with the lack of info regarding where the fck or which code break stuffs
Expo adds on-device debugging in SDK 49. This enable chrome dev tools for network inspection, breakpoints, real console logs, and more. Highly recommend
@@Baconbrix hi bacon. y're always listing the community
Yea, but react native produces like 60 mb apk for the simplest app.
I MIGHT be weird, but the in-sentence cuts to cut out dead air seem a bit grating in this video. The roughly 10 seconds after 3:30 are the biggest offender. The audio artifacts from those cuts make it a tad harder to listen to than I'm used to with your videos. Obviously I don't know how the raw footage was, and if and how it could have been improved, but I would rather leave that bit of criticism than not saying anything 😅
To me it's infuriating that RN still doesn't have display:grid and working autocentering. There, I said it.
i think it's extremely important to learn the native sides (android and ios) before even touching react native. im not a big fan of expo since it adds a REALLY thick abstraction layer to my app which is hard to debug/look into. expo is like a cage which limits the powers of react native. i have once setup my app with expo and soon enough i had to eject because expo wasn't providing the things i needed anymore. finally being able to change actual NATIVE code was freedom but expo haunted the project til the last day. i had to refactor the whole application into a bare react native project and i haven't had any problems since then. additionally, you can write native modules by yourself instead of relying on (no longer) maintained community libraries all the way.
@ryaaann Can you recommend some good sources to learn what exactly is the way to go about building a native module? I've coded in ObjectiveC/Java a long time ago and i am curious about this
Is Kivy still around?
react-native is also entering a new golden age with the new architecture, JSI and TurboModules.
What about Meta itself not building Threads app using React native 😢 ?
How about Google itself not building CZcams app, Drive app, Gmail App and much more using Flutter 😢 ?
@@timotiussimanjuntak9148 what do they use ? I have no idea. I thought they used flutter @
@@timotiussimanjuntak9148 as if the apps you mentioned were released a few weeks back.. 🤷
@@cowabunga2597no they use java/kotlin on Android and in iOS they use swift
@@biplabduttaif flutter was a big deal it's possible they change it to flutter even it's old app, so I think flutter is not a big deal 😂
2017 is now 7 years ago 😧
*almost*
until 2024, its 6 years old
Thank you
I hate, this is not a heavy term i really _h_a_t_e_ the term "sunsetting". Just stop sugar coating things, just be an adult and call things for what they are - at least use the established "discontinuing"
If it weren't for expo, React Native would have been a joke now.
why?
@@arjundureja go back to 2017 and develop a react native app with 2 or 3 native device capabilities. You will start to hate yourself
@@ijazkhan3335what do you mean lol, I don't use expo right now but I still get benefits from react native, and the DX also much better than using Flutter, especially if I use expo it would be increasing benefit for me
Makes sense
Finally, a video that would shut the naysayers! RN all the way!
Agreed 100%
Upgrading version react native break all in the project 😂, so painfull
Cool take. I love hearing good reasons to keep old tech around; really puts the ecosystem into perspective.
On another note, you know Theo's really passionate about the topic when you have to turn the video to 0.75 to understand what he's saying 😩
Old tech. Lmao
@@BenjaminFavre29 that's a whole 8 years we're talking about 😆time flies doesn't it
0.75x ?? what, i'm at 2x
Why not just do React with Capacitor?
Expo is the best!
For someone more informed, is the app size for react native still huge? I've seen some places talk about how RN basic hello world app is like 100MB compared to flutter's (I know, flutter bad, but still) 30, or native's 3-4MB.
I'm sure these differences get smaller percentage wise as the app grows, but that's still a pretty large startup cost.
I've been sitting on an app for a while now, and I was definitely thinking react native for it since I'm a react dev, and I wouldn't mind initial app size of like 50MB, but 100 seems a bit out of hand. Maybe it has gotten better though. I'm not even sure where I saw it, so I'm asking you educated people cuz I'm too lazy to google. Is it this bad, and if it is, does it make a difference in actual apps or would flutter/native things grow to 70-80 quickly as well? Or does it actually not matter for the most part cuz users don't care how large the app is? :P
@@tonyhart2744 Thing is, I don't care about speed. Or RAM usage. I do care about the amount of data the user has to download when installing the app.
if you use bare react native (cli), you actually get a smaller bundle size, the problem is with a react native expo app bundle size, those are huge (last time i checked it was like 70mb+), but bare rn you can get around 20-30mb bundle size with a lot of screens
for those who already know react learning react native is much much easy !!😃
Love all of this, but, there's no trpc 😢
Wait.. I should've listened till the end before commenting 🤣
I'd wager that most who hate on Native have never shipped mobile prod code in their life
You forgot to mention the "Please update sdk version" of their app when they release a new sdk version. It's the most annoying part of their tech for no reason other than piss their users off. They update their sdk while the actual emulator (expo go) is still not updated. You get frustrated, since you can't open any examples on their website unless you jump a lot of hoops.
flutter is good!! I know you dont like it, but its pretty good