What dependencies are you using that continuously broke? Did you track your package lock file on Git?
EDIT: Ive also tried React Native Web and it pretty much worked OOTB. Alerts were the only thing I found that weren't implemented, but they didn't show any runtime errors or instability
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.
As of RN 0.60 it has been completely smooth sailing developing a react native app sans expo IMO
If this happens over a weekend, expect your phone to blow up every three hours until it gets republished and fixed.
It’s nothing like ionic. When is the last time you used RN? RN apps are hard to tell from native.
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)
"Native" doesn't describe the programming language, but the GUI layer. Native == non-web-browser.
You can choose one of two things:
1) Run a single precomputed action or animation in native-land when receiving an event from JS. No interaction is possible.
2) Run a requestAnimationFrame loop in JS which is passing the bridge (6 API calls on Android - 3 layers per direction) 60-120 times per second in async mode. Enjoy the jank.
I'm quite sure and aware of people that love it, but just from my personal development background, it just never really seemed appealing to me. Definitely not a fan of how state is handled. I've rolled my own system, Redux, and a host of other solutions as well. It just all seemed unnecessarily complex.
As you said, to me it just felt like hacks on top of hacks. I'll take vanilla iOS and Android development any day of the week, and twice on Sunday.
With that said, and from what I've seen of Dart/Flutter, I really hope it takes off.
I guess the first is not backed by a big company and the second still has the Cordova stigma.
I'm sure every React developer has at some point found themselves banging their head on the wall trying to figure out why some child component isn't updating.
And yes, it's a personal preference, but I'm also not a fan of Javascript. If another client wants a single codebase app, I'm really gonna give Flutter a nice long look. I've read the docs, and it looks quite appealing.
For Redux with React, you could check out Redux Toolkit (https://redux-toolkit.js.org/). It solves a lot of the boilerplate issues with Redux. createSlice is especially valuable.
Did you know that Redux is now basically built into React?
https://medium.com/simply/state-management-with-react-hooks-...
https://blog.logrocket.com/use-hooks-and-context-not-react-a...
https://www.simplethread.com/cant-replace-redux-with-hooks/ https://daveceddia.com/context-api-vs-redux/ https://medium.com/javascript-scene/do-react-hooks-replace-r...
TL;DR Context can replace some but not all of Redux. Redux can figure out which components to rerender based on what's being computed. Context doesn't, so it's basically the same as refreshing your entire component tree every time something changes. You could build it yourself, but at that point, you're just reinventing Redux.
I also like the Redux Toolkit (https://redux-toolkit.js.org/) which is an opinionated way to write Redux that cuts down the boilerplate a lot. createSlice is easily one of the best features, you can encapsulate Redux logic for each different type of content, like authentication, users, posts, etc.
I'm currently working on updating the Redux core docs to teach RTK as the default way to use Redux. Hoping to have the new "Quick Start" tutorial page up in the near future.
I also couldn't find ways to easily implement things I want, e.g. native Mac MenuBar bindings/Mac App Store payment library etc.
Eventually I ended up using Quasar https://quasar.dev/, which allows you to use one Vue.js codebase but deploy to Cordova on mobile and Electron on desktop. Vue is definitely not the prettiest solution out there, but I had to be practical and actually get the app out.
Maybe I'm just one year too early for React Native/Flutter ecosystem to be developed enough for my app. The landscape is certainly changing rapidly, which is good.
Regarding Windows and Linux, I too was surprised at how well everything worked. You can't build to production yet for these two platforms (officially at least, see flutter-rs for unofficial implementations), but the debug builds still work as well as the Android and iOS emulators. I used them on a lower powered machine to run my Flutter apps and it was great that they worked well.
I wonder if React Native can do all of this officially, but I suppose that's not their prerogative, given that RN is mostly used by Facebook for apps and these other platform efforts are by third parties, like Microsoft here.