I think about this article a lot...

It's no secret that I'm a React Native fan. It's truly a shame that this AirBNB article will be cited as reason to not use it for the rest of time. Mobile devs deserve better.

S/O Ph4seOne for the awesome edit 🙏

[dylanclements]

Expo doesn’t get nearly as much recognition as it deserves

[xbsidesx]

This is a very good rant. Constructive, with actual arguments, critical but to the point. Must be nice to have a voice to put this out and reach the amount of people you do. Thank for sharing!

[senecamanu]

Expo got a lot of hate, even back in 2018 when I started doing React. Apparently it's always those "native" guys. I love expo, always been an expo fan, always love how they think of their plugins, and how they listen about their users. I'm surprised they don't cost $299 annually to use.

Thanks theo, I really dislike expo haters. This shit is too free.

[adaliszk]

I used to write apps with Cordova, they had the same idea that Expo+RN does but without assuming a framework and letting the render happen in a webview. Worked fine, and even back like 7-9 years ago it was fast enough that most devices had a native-like experience if you knew how to build a good SPA. React Native as far as I've been playing with is the next level where you are delivering a native experience where your domain logic can remain the good old JS level that pretty much everyone understands.

[darana]

Having spent the last 2 weeks working on a side project using RN, I can vouch that using it was a really nice and streamlined experience. A pet peeve of mine is the declarative nature of design in native android development. Being able to use tailwind css to design your app is SUCH a underrated benefit. Apart from that the ability to take the majority of stuff you know from React and being able to port it to RN is another plus as well.

The only things I don't like are: poor documentation. Maybe I'm going into it expecting too much after I've used the new React docs, but either way the RN docs, especially the ones on expo router are not good. While the content and details might be there, they are not structed in a good way at all. You continuously have to jump back and forth between 3 to 4 websites to do basic stuff like add a new screen with a tab icon at the bottom.

[riolly]

The new architecture is awesome.
Turbo Modules, Fabric, and the Codegen.

I hope there is more excitement on react native.

[zeroww]

I was put off from using RN by that Airbnb post, but thanks to a tight deadline, I had to still go with RN as it was using some concepts and tools I’m already familiar with from the web. The DX with bare RN setup was a bit of a headache, but I was able to get through it all, nowadays I’d go with Expo by default as it’s matured a lot! With Flutter, you don’t really know when big G is going to rug pull it, they kind of ditched everything to build a whole new ecosystem for Fuchsia and who knows how that will go? Seems like an unsafe bet.

[carbondesigned]

I've spent the last year ish in React Native/Expo. It is crazy how much it does with what seems like such minimal effort because it usually just works everywhere. Expo is a game changer though, from handling submitting to platforms with EAS to their new Expo Router. Expo Router is still super early but I think it's a really good shift.

[MiceInDownpour]

I am not a fan of flutter, but holy crap was working with RN a pita a lot of times. From unsolvable performance issues, to weird page transitions to build tooling that breaks on every minor update. It all felt flaky as hell. I haven't worked with RN for about a year now, but I definitely wouldnt' want to. RN probably once was a really great and innovative thing (and maybe it has moved and is that again), but flutter to me seemed a lot more stable. It's a bit like moving from electron to tauri. (though I love Tauri and just find flutter ok...)

[SteveBoyer]

Expo has gotten really amazing in the past couple years. I came back to it a couple months ago and was blown away by the progress they've made. Not using it seems crazy now!

[MichaelBrooksUK]

BlueSky is built with React Native, and the pace they're pushing out updates and moving forward is pretty amazing!

[bravethomasyt]

I would only consider RN or Capacitor for any mobile projects these days.

[igreha_wk]

I'm a full time RN developer and with our team we ejected the app from expo 4-5 months ago and it became much faster and flexible to use. Though there were a few expo plugins that could have made some tasks a bit easier but it's definitely not worth moving to expo

[ricoaw]

I got the point. I got new guy in my office said to don't use lodash since there is some article said it not good because of build size. then I read more about lodash found out it already has a way to optimize it.

[devor]

A lot of apps can be made in webview with no issues. Text, forms, images, simple animations, no one will see a difference between web and native framework. Even if you need more native apis you can use adapters to expose it to web.

[nilsandresen]

Expo 49 is already in beta and should come out this week, maybe next week 😊

[kengreeff]

Never had a problem with react native and I’ve built iOS apps in objective C and react native.

[adriankal]

It's like you absolutely never wrote anything beyond 3 screen app on mobile. React Native is nightmare to maintain. I had 3 projects written in n where the cost of upgrading app to new version of RN costed more than rewriting the whole app to flutter.

Aditionaly Apps in flutter are safer, have order of magnitude less bugs, you have ability to create UI on a pixel level, platform integration is done properly etc.

There is no case for react native. Even if your team is 100% js devs it's easier for them to learn dart and flutter than learn react native alone.

[neel]

Thank you for supporting react native btw

[zuzukouzina-original]

The resulting binary of react native is huge, that’s the reason I skipped react native. Flutter on the other hand comes close to swift/kotlin built app.
I was an Android and iOS dev using Java/ObjC, for me it’s more interesting to choose Flutter. React Native just doesn’t feel out of the box.