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Comment by chadlavi | Hacker News Reader

The question the whole web asks now: what does this mean for React Native devs

I bet it's going to stay relatively the same, for now. React Native still works across iOS and Android, which is one of the key features. SwiftUI is iOS only.

It's my understanding that a lot of the appeal of RN is also that it allows web devs who are fluent in JS to make mobile apps, so I guess that's not really comparable in SwiftUI either.

I'm not sure about that. SwiftUI code looks an awful lot like React code. And IMO (as a web dev), it was always learning the UI framework that seemed like it would be the difficult part of learning iOS dev. Data manipulation APIs are pretty similar in most languages, but learning a new UI paradigm is a pain...

Yes, but alongside learning SwiftUI they will also have to learn whatever is going on in Android land because it's not cross platform.

> SwiftUI is iOS only

It's also on macOS

I think it’s on tvOS and watchOS, too.

For the teams that would have gone native if it was easier/faster I imagine it does change the equation quite a bit. Makes me wonder how this changes things internally for mobile teams at Facebook as well.

For JS/web focused teams I don’t think it impacts much, just like I don’t think this impacts Ionic developers that much.

> For the teams that would have gone native if it was easier/faster I imagine it does change the equation quite a bit (Airbnb for ex).

Airbnb have always been native, and their one foray into partially using React Native didn't work out:

https://medium.com/airbnb-engineering/sunsetting-react-nativ...

I think React Native devs still want to be able to deploy to Windows. Unless I'm really missing something here...

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