You might recognize a few on this list: http://facebook.github.io/react-native/showcase.html

None of those are apps I particularly enjoy using or would want to use.

Facebook? Instagram? Airbnb? We're talking about some of the most popular apps in the world. What exactly is your problem with them?

Facebook app also has huge chunks of platform-native code, it's why they also have things like Litho: https://fblitho.com/

And according to their announcement post Litho is what they are using for their News Feed: https://code.facebook.com/posts/1187475984695956/open-sourci...

So the most critical part of the Facebook app isn't in React Native. How much of those other apps are actually using React Native?

I mean, do you realize that most of the big names on that list have a hybrid solution where they prove concepts, A/B test, and rapidly iterate-on/release new features using React Native, and then they have a native dev team for each platform that goes back and re-implements most of the core features natively?

Discord is the most impressive one to me. They definitely didn't have those resources when they wrote their iOS app[0].

The Android version is just RxJava, iirc, because of some performance issues they couldn't get around.

[0] https://blog.discordapp.com/using-react-native-one-year-late...

At that time when they released, the React Native Android was probably still in a kind of beta state.

RN Android still feels like beta.

How so? I run into the occasional hiccup an iOS and Android, but overall both have been pretty smooth for me.

That’s correct. AirBnB’s iOS app is written mostly in Swift. And Facebook’s iOS app is a piece of shit performance wise.

they are the most popular because they are needed to access a service. But they are all a fucking pain to use.

How are they a "fucking pain to use"? I have never heard an average person complain about Instagram's UI. It's fine. It's good, even.

Can you give some examples of popular apps that are not "a fucking pain to use?"

None of those are apps that I'd hold up as paragons of UI design…

yeah, the question still stands. instagram is a particularly nice example of what i'm talking about: it was much snappier pre-fb aquisition. (tho of course hard to know how much of that if any is the fault of react native or other things changing.)

Even development ease is somewhat illusionary. To be effective you will still need to know the details of iOS/Android and sometimes just write native code. At the end, why not just go full-native instead of writing and rewriting bridges.

No, you sacrifice platform specificity for better or broader functionality (given the same development capacity).

Of course, with unlimited development capacity, for each React Native app there could be a better purely native app.

Another point also often forgotten is that the user experience of a React Native app, while not as 'platformy', will be very coherent for users of multiple platforms. That can also be considered as 'better', given you are such a user.

Instagram uses react native, I believe

Have you heard of Facebook?