HACKER Q&A
📣 cgb223

React Native or Native development for apps? (2020 Edition)


It’s 2020 and hybrid mobile development frameworks like React Native have been improving.

When I last looked into this Native was still king and the friends at startups I knew who were excited about React Native were starting to rewrite their apps in native due to a variety of bugs and limitations

Years have passed, and all technology improves (Hopefully anyway...). How do Hybrid mobile development frameworks compare today to native development?

Have you or your company been successful in implementing an app in a hybrid way that didn’t leave you thinking “man, I really wish I could do X but I cant”? If so, what was the app?

I know I say react native but if there are other hybrid frameworks you love, please bring them up!

I hear Google just came out with one as well, so I’m interested to hear how those compare

  👤 GoldenMonkey Accepted Answer ✓
I have just rolled off a react-native project. And a xamarin project. Both were real PITA's. Spent more time debugging than coding. And trying to bend the framework to look and feel native. Still not seeing the benefits of hybrid. We programmers like to trade one pain for another pain.

It's painful to learn native, but the trade is debugging across more platforms. And learning three mobile paradigms (hybrid, ios, and android). And the complexity of shoehorning this, to support native properly.

Quicker to develop using hybrid? Definitely an unrealized myth.

Just learn native. Been doing native and used every major hybrid solution since 2008.

👤 jamil7
It kind of depends on what you want to build but I tend to always write my own apps natively, I do cross platform for clients from time to time though as they request it. I think if you have some existing service you want to provide a simple app in the app store for then React Native etc can make sense. If you want to build an app that is itself a product to sell then you're better off going native for a variety of reasons. As others have pointed out cross platform just always comes with its own set of problems by design, there isn't any way around that. SwiftUI and Jetpack Compose are lowering the barrier to entry by providing a much faster and easier UI development workflow.
👤 krrishd
I'm curious, being relatively removed from this context (last I explored the options, stuff like PhoneGap was still going on lol):

with its native toolchain, does Apple try to actively compete with and/or disadvantage stuff like React Native, or are React Native's "bugs/limitations" just incidental / on the React team's end? does Apple have an opinion about these things? i remember them being hostile to webview-driven stuff but this is materially different, right?

👤 thiago_fm
Still the same as 2019:

Simple app and limited resources: react native.

Complex app and decent amount of resources: native.

I believe many of the apps in the market could be just React Native apps though, without many issues. But people usually have money and would rather go the safe route, which is fine.

👤 iordachej
We needed to switch twice from hybrid to native simply because hybrid apps cannot grow in complexity beyond a certain point. As long as the app is simple go with hybrid, as a rule.