Comment by diegof79 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by diegof79 | Hacker News Reader

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I had the same experience.

Expo is wonderful for prototyping and quick iteration. The ability to use Snacks online and see them working on the phone is great.

But beyond that everything in RN feels hacky and unfinished. While working with it I had some silly issues with Metro, and found some subtle bugs in Text and Button components.

About the "Native" part. I think that a lot of people have the expectation that doing RN apps will be the same as building a iOS or Android native app. But RN+Expo is not that different from frameworks like Ionic. Is really hard to do an app that follows the Apple HIG or Material Guidelines, you end with something in the middle that doesn't look or feels truly native (at least not without tons of extra work to imitate things that you get for free in the native UI kit) .

RN without Expo is not so nice, lots of rough edges and sooner or later you'll need to write interop code in Objective-C or Android Java to take advantage of the native platform.

I had the opposite experience actually. Expo made it difficult to accomplish anything with their ever changing sdk and (what felt like) never ending version deprecations and I found sooner or later for any serious project one would inevitably need to eject.

As of RN 0.60 it has been completely smooth sailing developing a react native app sans expo IMO

And I’d like to second this experience. Expo was more pain than it was worth for us, and raw RN was great once you understood it’s toolchain.

Expo has one small issue... if you are in an organization that isn't capable of keeping it up to date and it becomes deprecated, your app will stop working.

If this happens over a weekend, expect your phone to blow up every three hours until it gets republished and fixed.

Unless you are referring to another issue, using `expo build:android` will create an apk file so you don't have to rely on staying up to date with the Expo app.

Yeah, but if you are using their native extensions and they deprecate your version, their repo will become unavailable and your app will fail to start.

That’s a massive claim to say RN doesn’t feel native without alot of extra work? Please elaborate because it feels pretty native out of the box using the standard components.

It’s nothing like ionic. When is the last time you used RN? RN apps are hard to tell from native.

Take the most basic example: a Button.

The RN's core Button it’s a Text composed with a Touchable (https://github.com/facebook/react-native/blob/master/Librari...). It behaves in the same way but there are subtle differences in text rendering: the font size and letter spacing is not exactly the same, so when you create a native looking iOS view it doesn’t look the same unless to fine tune the font settings (and of course that will break when iOS decides to change it). This is just one small example, another one in iOS is “routing”. With the RN Router you don’t get the native components but a simulation of it. But Apple HIG doesn’t document many details of the animations and behavior of headings and nav bar (they assume that you use the native component). So if you want to have a native look and feel your options are: try an alternative router built for iOS, try to build your own adapter (hard unless you have tons of native dev experience), or try to imitate the native platform. All the options have pros and cons, and require more extra work over a small UI detail that you get for free using native tools. At least Flutter took the effort to make it look native by default.

In the end is similar to the desktop: if you want cross platform code is easier to not follow the platform rules. The differentiator of RN is that you have the option to embed the native widgets, which is not always easy. (The last time I used RN was mid-2019, I didn’t see substantial changes since then)

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