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Comment by xenadu02

I sympathize with cross-platform development woes (we have this problem too) but I can't say I've ever been impressed with a cross-platform app developed using React Native (or anything else cross-platform).

A React Native app isn't horrible or bad (nothing like Java Swing) but it also isn't delightful to use. Technically you have animations and things like the cross-platform navigator. In reality, you have a lot of performance issues and strange incompatibilities due to attempting to execute animation keyframes on the JS thread (or replace the system-provided navigation bar in the case of Navigator). It isn't terribly easy on battery life either.

I'd rather write my sync and offline storage system in JS and share that across platforms while leaving the entire view layer as native code. That stuff is far harder to get right for non-trivial apps, it just isn't sexy and most web devs ignore it completely because hey - the web browser is always online!

I'm biased though. Our customers download 5-10 GB projects with millions of objects in them because when you're building a hospital the MRI room is a literal faraday cage. No such thing as internet access in there and telling the user they can't pull up plans or engineering specs because they're offline is a non-starter.

parent xenadu02 10 years ago

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