Ask HN: Is React Native ready for building high quality mobile apps?

[sinatra]

The showcase apps for React Native doesn't have very many rich & complex mobile apps (except for Facebook's own apps, but we don't really know how much of those apps are actually React Native based). NativeScript showcase page is even worse. So, I thought of asking HNers what their experience with RN (or NativeScript) has been. If you were starting a new mobile app startup, would you bet on React Native or NativeScript? If not, what are the main reasons against it?

[girvo]

Yes. Where I work we are building a cross-platform iOS, iPad, Android and Android tablet with it, and it's brilliant! Super nice API, performance and tooling. Use Nuclide though, the React and Flow support is second to none

[cballard]

Good: User interface declared as a pure function of state.

Bad: Doing that in a language without a moderately competent type system.

Would be interested in a Swift port, using plain old structs instead of tags.

[girvo]

Flow is not only completely supported, but entirely recommended. And it's type system is excellent, so I'm not sure what you mean?

[mattchue]

Check out Discord. It's like Slack for gamers, I've been using it with some friends. It's written in React Native, and uses regular 'ol React on the desktop. Feels clean and like a native app.

https://discordapp.com/

[010a]

Its almost sad how low our standards have become in what seems like a "native app".

[narrowrail]

There was a thread from a week ago discussing a React IDE, that seems to have gotten more traction (though not exactly what you were looking for:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11074653

[johnieeboy]

the lack of response in this thread makes me weary of using react native for my own project.

[spicyj]

The entire Facebook Ads Manager app (on both platforms) is written in React Native; there's no custom native code in either app.

[yojoma]

Also interested in seeing thoughts on Ionic

[rajangdavis]

I haven't built anything complex or production ready with Ionic, but I have played around with it a bit to see it's value.

I really feel like Ionic should be a bit more up front about some of the additional dependencies you may need to get it going (Android SDK and NDK are the only ones that stick out in my mind, but I remember it being a pain in the butt), but other than that, it's pretty neat.

I hacked together a quick and dirty Android app based on the Angular/Firebase TodoMVC web app; it took about 2 hours because of some of the configuration, but I got it to work on my phone.

The styling was not the best or at least not what you would expect from a mobile application. I do know that Ionic comes with built in widgets like tabs and stuff. If you are already familiar with Angular and UI Router, it's not too difficult to use. I just had a hard time with setting up the proper dependencies.