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Comment by kumarm | Hacker News Reader

I don't think ReactNative has a reason to exist other than Facebook wanting to own Platform (Which they might abandon just like Parse).

Good Read: https://www.reddit.com/r/androiddev/comments/5qr9xw/avoiding...

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A lot of that commenter's points are really diatribes without fully understanding RN, or the 3rd party environment around it.

The absolute biggest con with RN is performance. Redux and aggressive shouldComponentUpdates are your friends here. Airbnb's Lottie library (and FB's keyframes) can help with complex animations and the bad perf associated with those.

The dev tradeoffs are 100% worth it.

The end-product tradeoffs are 95% worth it.

We've had to do some things in-house to circumvent some RN bugs, but that time spent there pales by multiple orders of magnitude in comparison to the time saved by starting a cross-platform app from scratch with RN.

I think you might be confusing Facebook with Google.

Ask any app developer that's used React Native or any web developer that's had to create a native app if it has a reason to exist.

Facebook has hundreds or thousands of React developers that - before React Native - could only develop for web. Now they can move their web developers to their native apps almost seamlessly.

And that's a good thing? I'm being serious here. The web ranks among the crappiest user experience I have with software I use today. And when I speak with colleagues who do the web development at the company I work for they seem far from happy with their development environments and process. It's like the presentation, in which MB of JavaScript are required to render a few paragraphs of text with a side bar or drop-down menu, went to the development environment where thousands of dependencies are required to produce "hello world."

The last thing I want is to see yet more traveling down the path of "web app" style development for my phone's apps.

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