calvin_c

It was on one of the early versions of the Yelp iOS app as well. Don't really remember if it was there on day one, but I remember playing around with it in iOS 2 or 3.

Exactly. It’s an abstraction, you will always be a few libraries and components away from implementing what you actually want, but that’s a lot to build on just to use a system provided tool. For instance, I’m working on upgrading my company’s app to use iOS 11’s new password auto fill APIs. All it needs is for you to set the UITextField’s contentType properly to one of a dozen enumerated values, in this case Username and Password. React Native doesn’t expose that propertie on the TextField component however, so I have to either build my own extension on top of the TextField component or form the React Native project and submit a PR to get this feature working, a feature that’s explicitly supposed to be painless to implement. There are so many cases like this around React Native, the community mindset is usually just to find another dependency to integrate.

Correct. Every React Native component actually renders into a native view, so on iOS if you use a View (RN) it maps to a UIView when React Native actually builds the UI.

Yes, that is certainly possible. It doesn’t have to be 100% either way, you could do any combination of React Native and proper Native you want.

Could not agree more. There are certainly benefits to using React Native, especially when bootstrapping an app and you've already got a React shop, but once your app and user base gets larger it creates a serious barrier to actually taking advantage of the native platform and it's capabilities.

Certainly does, which is why our score went down last year before Trump took office.

I think they're trying to say that the democracy is now worse because we have a leader who is lying to the media, threatening voting rights based on unsupported claims, silencing scientists from sharing publicly funded research, and is charging journalists with felony charges for covering protests against him.