Hacker News Reader

Comment by migueloller | Hacker News Reader

> If you want to use JS and react to make a native app, try react native instead.

Given the discussion of the recent ReactXP thread, I'm guessing most people don't realize you can do this today. React Native supports macOS [1] and UWP [2].

Edit: There's even some early work on Ubuntu support [3].

[1] https://github.com/ptmt/react-native-macos

[2] https://github.com/Microsoft/react-native-windows

[3] https://github.com/CanonicalLtd/react-native/blob/ubuntu/REA...

View on HN

And no, I didn't know React Native supports Windows and MacOS. I did know it was iOS/Android only.

I think the choice is obvious at this point, if the Windows version is complete and stable, I will start using it instead of Electron.

react-native-macos is a great project but it's not sponsored by Facebook and is way behind Electron in terms of the exposed API's and stability.

There still seems to be a big problem that Electron is addressing that these React Native solutions aren't bothered with: it seems that users need to have Windows 10 whereas if you look at the OS market share, Win 7 still has the most usage at almost 50%

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_syste...

I would love to use React but if this is not addressed, there's no way I'm ignoring 1/2 users in the Windows ecosystem.

Is that the case or am I wrong? Can you run these React Native forks on Windows 7?

EDIT: Win 7 usage might be higher than is widely reported

https://www.netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share...

I was about to call bullshit on the blog author, but I guess we are getting to that point. I've been hoping for a React or Vue-native version for desktop so that the Chromium in Electron could be avoided.

I'm probably in that camp too, I thought it was just for android and iOS still (even though I consider myself to keep up to date with these types of things).

Do you know if they have anything for linux yet?

There's some early work for Ubuntu here [1].

You can also currently use React to share code across iOS [2], Android [3], UWP [4], macOS [5], web [6], VR [7] and a bunch of other stuff that is there mostly for fun (like React Hardware [8] and React Sketch.app [9]).

There's also experimental work on defining a set of primitives that works across all of these platforms [10].

[1] https://github.com/CanonicalLtd/react-native/blob/ubuntu/REA...

[2] https://github.com/facebook/react-native

[3] https://github.com/facebook/react-native

[4] https://github.com/Microsoft/react-native-windows

[5] https://github.com/ptmt/react-native-macos

[6] https://github.com/necolas/react-native-web

[7] https://github.com/facebook/react-vr

[8] https://github.com/iamdustan/react-hardware

[9] https://www.npmjs.com/package/react-sketchapp

[10] https://github.com/lelandrichardson/react-primitives

I originally thought React Native was for all platforms, then I read their website and docs which made me realize it was only for mobile. That all went down a few weeks ago. Now, today, I find out I had it right the first time. How big a shortcoming is it of their website that it made me go away thinking it was something it wasn't when I had the right thing in mind?

Same here, it makes me wonder how hard it is to build for all the platforms as well given that they are all spread out across so many different repos.

Ubuntu support? Are you kidding me? Is Ubuntu an OS? Is it an UI tookit? So what in fact is React Native Ubuntu? Probably a React Native backend that displays the UI on Shuttleworth's ego.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com