This article is definitely FUD, there are a few irritating things about React Native, but I think it's still far preferable to native development for most apps.
I'll list the annoyances:
- npm is a mess, and many libraries in the ecosystem handle sub-dependencies improperly. Facebook has contributed to yarn but has not established a very clear contract for what a properly organized package should be. Thus it is not possible to easily determine which package or sub-package, or sub-sub package (etc) is misbehaving. I estimate that this issue has eaten up easily 10% of the productivity gains that React Native has offered. Facebook generally ignores the github issues about this stuff, in spite of hundreds and hundreds of users having these issues.
- Updating to a newer version of React Native is cumbersome. There is a utility called react-native-git-upgrade which often fails to reconcile changes in the ios-specific configuration files. Much of this is due to problems with XCode (not sure how anyone tolerates using that). Compared to simple makefiles XCode's system that react-native interacts with is horribly brittle.
- Important libraries are not embraced by Facebook. Things like camera support are not included in React Native's scope, so third party libraries exist, yet often lag because the developer can't make time to keep up with pull request. Facebook should hire the top 15% of community contributors to maintain those projects in-house. Right now probably 30-50% of community libraries are not compatible with the latest stable React-Native. Facebook should realize that library maintainers do not have enough time to properly maintain these libraries and should offer more support and guidance, not to help the maintainers as much as to help people trying to use open source libraries from the community.
- Some of the React Native code is pretty ugly. A few times I've had to debug issues and some of it looks like it was written very rapidly and could use a refactor for clarity and ease of debugging. Not the core algorithms stuff, just the bundle management stuff.
But in spite of all this I'd still use React Native on a new project. Most apps that aren't strongly architecture-driven could be written in a day or two. It's pretty amazing.
I'll list the annoyances:
- npm is a mess, and many libraries in the ecosystem handle sub-dependencies improperly. Facebook has contributed to yarn but has not established a very clear contract for what a properly organized package should be. Thus it is not possible to easily determine which package or sub-package, or sub-sub package (etc) is misbehaving. I estimate that this issue has eaten up easily 10% of the productivity gains that React Native has offered. Facebook generally ignores the github issues about this stuff, in spite of hundreds and hundreds of users having these issues.
- Updating to a newer version of React Native is cumbersome. There is a utility called react-native-git-upgrade which often fails to reconcile changes in the ios-specific configuration files. Much of this is due to problems with XCode (not sure how anyone tolerates using that). Compared to simple makefiles XCode's system that react-native interacts with is horribly brittle.
- Important libraries are not embraced by Facebook. Things like camera support are not included in React Native's scope, so third party libraries exist, yet often lag because the developer can't make time to keep up with pull request. Facebook should hire the top 15% of community contributors to maintain those projects in-house. Right now probably 30-50% of community libraries are not compatible with the latest stable React-Native. Facebook should realize that library maintainers do not have enough time to properly maintain these libraries and should offer more support and guidance, not to help the maintainers as much as to help people trying to use open source libraries from the community.
- Some of the React Native code is pretty ugly. A few times I've had to debug issues and some of it looks like it was written very rapidly and could use a refactor for clarity and ease of debugging. Not the core algorithms stuff, just the bundle management stuff.
But in spite of all this I'd still use React Native on a new project. Most apps that aren't strongly architecture-driven could be written in a day or two. It's pretty amazing.