Tldr: Keep it that way.

I've started working on a side-project developing a mobile application when Fuse[1] got "traction". I remember the bashing on HN regarding the name (since well libfuse). I'm usually all sys/backend, but I've got into it. You start digging through their board and see a lot of examples, catch around stuff on their channel and so on. Kind of joy sometimes.

The thing is, I've been planning to support both iOS and Android from the early start. So that was really a great choice, it looked promising. Or so was I thinking.

After fine 7 months, my new shiny mobile app. was behind somehow manageable code and one developer - me. Stay still, I never worked on mobile before. So I went for market and hit few clients at an early stage. Good news everyone, we got this. As a co-founder with other two, designer and marketing manager, we went out as a `free` and rent the magical space. The hype was there and -. Clients started requesting features, which meant another success. The ideas presented were fine with us and I started working furiously on it. Pressure and all, inb4 start digging for more developers. Few remote devs and features are ready, users love them. Now it gets to more advanced features, UI, code starts to get abstract, and devs aren't sure if they web, script or compile. We somehow managed to stay on ball.

After five such months, we ditched the Fuse and rewrote to native. Since devs where remote, they understood the cards. Some of them are still here. Now we are all happy, codebase is eh.. fine, stuff are supported, you know.

The story speaks I think. These tools, at early stage, should be took as a grant of salt. I do however appreciate work given towards creating xp stuff. Some of these tools are great for prototyping.

[1] https://www.fusetools.com/

Exactly. I wonder if in the future we will more demand API stability of our host platforms so we aren't rewriting the same framework on every API change. I feel like I'm always building on sinking sand, that my programs have half-lives shorter then radioactive elements. Say what we want about Microsoft but they have always valued API stability.

Apple’s frameworks are relatively stable.

Maybe we shouldn’t be building frameworks on top of frameworks on top of other languages?

Maybe officially supported tools/languages are often a good choice.

Experience taught me that it is always the best option for production code.

I understand what you're getting at and agree with the sentiment. Knowing work on the .NET framework is going to be supported (see: not broken) for years to come is a big factor for deciding on a basket for your eggs. But aren't most radioactive elements notorious for having half-lives that are long with respect to the human lifespan? Just sayin'.

Yeah, the radioactive element comment is more statement on how our products are slowly decaying. But if I was to choose one with a half-life similar to the lifetime of the products I've worked on I'd go with the isotope: Sodium-22 with a half-life of 2.602 years.

Edit: Going by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_radioactive_isotopes_b..., it seems that most of the halflives fall in the 10^(n where n <= 6) seconds category which is smaller than a human lifetime.

I just saw a tweet this morning reminding React Native people about three20, the previous Facebook framework that they abandoned.

At least React Native has been around for a while and has a good sized community.

This is a neat little project but I would treat it like a toy unless you were willing to step up and take over maintence before usi it for a production app.

(This wasn’t meant as a stab at React Native, it was meant as a warning about picking up frameworks that don’t have much history. RN is a few years old. I don’t think it will disappear next year).

For those who don't know, Three20 really was two order of magnitude less involving if you decided to use it. It really was just a library of convenient classes that you could choose to use or not, or just part of it.

RN is an entirely different beast...

Thanks, I never heard of Three20, but I use RN for 5 months now.

When I saw the original tweet I hadn’t either and had to Google it.

Yes, and there is not big company behind this one as far as I can see, Google's Flutter and Facebook's React Native will for sure have support from these companies cause they have projects written with their frameworks but this one, I'm hessitant.

Right now I'm vouching for Flutter, I tried their golden prototype "Hamilton — The Official App" on a slow android device and it runs pretty smooth. Not sure about iOS tho.

Well, someone probably said the same about Go or React-Native when they first came out too. We have to start somewhere...

> Well, someone probably said the same about Go or React-Native when they first came out too

RN came from a giant company that uses it in its core product. Big difference.

Use to be that if there was a nice open source project that solved most of a problem you had, you'd jump on, if you had the ability, and contribute back to it. Now I guess we just wait for random handouts from big companies so we don't have to do any work ourselves. Bit of a shame, the appification of open source, but I guess that's where it's going. Big and supported, with no room for newcomers. I wonder how this is much different than what people say about net neutrality? Once the big guys are there, they'll actively do what they can to kick the latter down so no upstarts can chase them up it, and I guess this is just as true of the web. Hope we can find a big company to release us an open source web replacement one of these decades, since I guess we won't be able to band together and build it for ourselves.

I see it as a sign of maturity. People now realize it's completely unreasonable to think about debugging or maintaining some codebase as a hobby themselves (aka: in addition to the product they're building). For a cross-platform dev framework on mobile, knowing the pace at which those platforms are moving, you need something that has both the team , the fund and the stakes.

> Now I guess we just wait for random handouts from big companies so we don't have to do any work ourselves.

Yeah the kids nowadays are terrible.

Large codebases have never been particularly welcoming to newcomers.

We grew up and realised that only open source from big companies actually pays the bills.

Painful but honest at least.

As did Go - Google is as equally giant as Facebook and uses Go in it core products.

cf https://talks.golang.org/2012/splash.article

(Agree with parent but not wanting Go to be left out of the "giant company" bucket.)

You're comparing Go to RN. The comparison he's making is Matcha to RN. Matcha doesn't come from a giant company. The language it's in does, but that doesn't mean anything for framework momentum.

We are discussing about the framework itself and not go as a language.

The framework is a nice idea, and will definitely help into diversifying some of the mobile frontend stuff.

On the other hand you can't compare RN to this framework.

As the person you commented on, facebook has been using RN on its main products like instagram, so it has proven that the framework can be placed on production ready apps with a massive userbase.

That's not really a direct comparison. We're not talking about languages here - it's the framework. React Native is used and developed by Facebook, whereas Matcha is used and developed by no one notable (afaik).

So did Three20

This sentiment seems to be in the tiny minority.

But it could be a major contributing factor to issues like the Javascript framework ecosystem changing every 6 months.

That's my point.

The biggest problem with these frameworks is that they ignore the elephant in the room.

We already have a widely adopted, widely compatible, highly developed and open framework for cross platform development: webpages.

My confidence that Mr. J. Random Hacker - or even J. Random Company Inc. - can do better than this - and support it for over 2 decades - is close to 0.

If this framework focalizes on iOS and Android then it might be more useful than webpages in some cases. Native applications are still the way to go if you need to do computationally intensive tasks, UIs that are responsive (especially on Android), UIs that display real time data (especially on iOS) and anything that uses the cool features the phones have.

Can you expand on why non-native iOS apps struggle with displaying real-time data, and why anroid’s struggle with responsiveness?

Sure. The current problem on iOS is that you can not replace the web-rendering engine, thus you have to send messages or call callbacks into the web engine api. You have no guarantees as to when they will be actually executed and you have to serialize your data.

In my application I needed to display data incoming from a sensor. I can only access this data using the native functions and it comes at around 500Hz from 16 sensors.

For comparison, in Electron, when you call a function defined in a module written in C++, you can get the answer in under 1 ms. When using something like Cordova, you have to serialize the data which can take a seriously long time and then you have to wait for the callback to execute. On Android I suppose it is quite possible to write a V8 native plugin and achieve this performance, but not on iOS where you are limited to included webkit.

As for the Android responsiveness, the problem lies with the single threaded nature of JavaScript. CPUs on android phones _suck_ in single core performance. When I was looking for a good solution for multi platform development, I have found of a tech meeting that was supposed to present solutions taken by several different companies. It turned to be a huge complaint-fest about Android javascript performance and the only happy people were those using Xamarin (which is native).

Edit: Note that I think that using web views for applications like banking or chat and so on is perfectly fine. My issue is with apps that eat a lot of incoming data and/or have to change what is displayed very often.

Don't know about Android, but on iOS and macOS, Apple introduced the WKWebView technology that is recommended over using normal web views (the old way for many years), and it interacts seamlessly and instantly with Swift (and probably Objective-C too), the system even bridges the types for you as they go across the boundary. Apple specifically tried to further support the growing desire to use web views and Javascript technology inside a native app. I've used it quite successfully, the experience feels like native.

Perhaps systems that automatically build out to iOS have not been updated to use these features, or there is something else going on in Cordova to introduce latency? Because for at least 2 years now there is no reason to have the problem you describe.

> interacts seamlessly and instantly

You clearly haven’t used WKWebView. It renders off-process, so actually data passi gbetween your native code and the JS contained in it is even slower. This is in addition to the many many many limitations due to the off-process nature of the system.

I have used it extensively, and I've never noticed the latency you described.

Maybe some day, when people won't prefer native apps over webpages.

What good does it do to make a webpage using technologies that will have support two decades from now (by the way, that isn't happening either), if what you need is people using your webpage/app now?

Thats true, however in the long term, we need a react like framework that solves cross platform development. React Native has lots of problems with navigation, the AirBnB team even stopped using it seriously.

I guess Kotlin and Kotlin Native (which runs on ios) could be a good started for building a KotlinReactNative, which allows creating an UI in a DSL based syntax that works on multiple platforms.

> the AirBnB team even stopped using it seriously

This just isn't true. Airbnb is actively using React Native a lot and has not "stopped using it seriously". I'm not sure where you got this impression. Some people responding to this are mentioning the transition of the potential native-navigation library to react-community. This is a library that we never actually used in production, though the plan was to move off of our internal library to this one shortly after open sourcing it. Priorities shifted internally (to other, more pressing react-native related things that aren't OSS), and we have not yet been able to do that. Since the community really wanted to work on the library despite us not actively maintaining it, transitioning it to react-community seemed like a better thing to do than further fragment the community by having people fork it. I'm still hopeful that we will be able to migrate to it in the future.

Source: I am the tech lead of React Native infrastructure at Airbnb and the primary author of native-navigation.

Thanks for your reply @lrichardson. I got the impression that ReactNative was having a hard-time within AirBnB lately due to a lukewarm response from Native Developers. (You mentioned this in an interview). Sorry for my mis-interpretation.

Where does AirBnB actually use ReactNative, and where is it purely native? I was in the understanding the move to ReactNative was not going "the way you preferred".

I can imagine there are some roadblocks using it everywhere. Or some hesitation from Native Developers.

For me also: Using JavaScript as a language run inside a interpreter inside my app doesn't seem like a smart move. Also native like navigation, activity lifecycle, animation etc are probably hard to get right with React Native.

@TeeWEE,

Do you have any info on why Airbnb stopped using React Native? Would love a good read on why.

We have definitely not stopped using React Native! Not sure where you got that impression. We continue to heavily invest in it as well as native platforms and make a case by case decision for all new products.

Also interested in hearing if they really stopped using React Native as a whole. Especially since their react-native-maps library is the defacto library for maps. It would be quite scary if they decided to stop using React Native.

Right now, the only thing I'm currently aware of is that their navigation library (native-navigation [1]) is pretty much unmaintained and they are trying to plan out a transition to move it under react-community.[2] The only thing that hints at their slowing use of React Navigation is the mention of conversion to React Native's navigation getting a much lower priority to the point that the native-navigation library has essentially become unmaintained.[3] But when I initially read that, it didn't come off as Airbnb deciding to stop using React Native.

[1] https://github.com/airbnb/native-navigation

[2] https://github.com/airbnb/native-navigation/issues/145

[3] https://github.com/airbnb/native-navigation/issues/145#issue...

> React Native has lots of problems with navigation, the AirBnB team even stopped using it seriously.

Is this true? I'd be interested to see a citation on AirBnB stopping using it, last I heard they were going all-in.

As for the issues with navigation, isn't it just that there isn't a great navigation library yet?

AirBnb is not acitvely mainting this: https://github.com/airbnb/native-navigation

And one of the main persons behind ReactNative at AirBnB seems to be less enthousiastic in his latest interview.. However i cant find the interview anymore

Assuming the person you're talking about was me, I'm curious what it was I said that made me seem less enthusiastic? I always try to be as honest as possible in my interviews, and I don't think my enthusiasm has changed much over the last year or two, though I certainly have learned a lot!

I don't think Airbnb has ever been "completely going all-in on React Native" or "completely dropping React Native", but people always seem to want it to be one or the other. The truth is it's almost always something in the middle.

Do you think they've switched to another navigation framework? I've had some success with https://reactnavigation.org/ - although it's fairly early stage.

We have actually be using an internal navigation framework that is unfortunately quite tightly coupled to our app. It's been working very week for us which is why we decided to make an open source "clone" of it. Our original intention was to migrate our internal navigation library over to the open source clone we made. However, with the realities of life, we haven't had the time to actually do that yet which is why we haven't been maintaining it.

Like Leland said above, we're still working hard and making exciting progress on React Native but we continue to invest in native platforms as well and product teams make a case by case decision on which one to use.

Hope that clarifies things a bit :)

Thanks so much, that's great!

There has been some consolidation in this area lately. Everyone should be on React Navigation from now onwards.

https://github.com/react-community/react-navigation

Don't know if it's related, but maybe this has to do with AirBnB releasing their own navigation library (native-navigation), meanwhile Wix's react-native-navigation seems to be seeing more activity and slowly becoming the officially sanctioned RN navigation library?

I was recently reading up on Ionic[1], is going the hybrid route not considered a viable option for solving the cross platform development problem? I am not a front-end developer but also have a recent need for something similar to Matcha/React/Kotlin.

[1] https://ionicframework.com/

Depends on the problem you're solving. I've seen a ton of ionic apps written for in-house use at large enterprises. Often the lower cost of maintenance and development costs more than justifies the slightly poorer UX that usually comes with cordova apps. That tradeoff isn't always acceptable in a direct to consumer app, which is why you don't see a ton of popular apps in the app/play store backed by ionic framework.

Thanks for your feedback. Would it make sense then to prototype an app in Ionic/Corodva before paying someone to replicate the functionality natively using Java/Swift? Or is that really just false economy? My use case is really just a proof of concept at the moment.

I'd start even simpler and use a tool like Figma to prototype the UI and workflows that are at the core of your app. Then start actual development based on the feedback from showing it to potential users.

A lot will depend on why you need cross-platform support at launch. For most direct to consumer apps, your intended user base should skew to one platform or the other and should be large enough to support a beta and launch on a single platform. Not launching with both platforms supported won't make or break your app and launching with both without much mobile experience to begin with could even prove to be a distraction while you try to iterate on you're app's design.

If you're selling an app to businesses, then not supporting both iOS and Android at launch would be a real roadblock. In that case starting and maybe even staying with Ionic could make sense.

Thanks, yeah I am looking at a B2B project right now. Given that, is there value in using Figma as a first step or would that be redundant?

My only recommendation would be to not skip the prototyping phase, even if it's just a pen and paper. No matter how fast you are mocking things up in html, you'll almost always going to be faster sketching it out. When I started mobile development for the first time, I jumped right into coding and I feel like I wasted a lot of time re-arranging things I could have avoided if I just took the time to sketch it out.

Early this year, they switched to their own navigation library. The issue they had with React Native's navigation components was they have a React Native project that used to be a native iOS project, so they had to navigate across "screens" from 2 different toolsets seamlessly.

You wouldn't have this problem if you start a React Native project from scratch.

They seem to be still using React Native. Have you heard otherwise?

to clarify: we never "switched: to our own navigation library. We built our own from the start, and have never switched.