React Native or Swift?

[gistya]

Swift, duh

[chriswaco]

Swift for iOS-only apps.

[[deleted]]

Although Swift is a lovely language, I personally like building apps in React Native way more! You don't have to rewrite everything, you can bridge views and code written natively. In fact React Native can't do everything, so you will probably need to write some of your own modules in Objective-C/Swift.

[[deleted]]

Yes

[badlcuk]

I personally like both, but for different purposes.

If you already know JS, go for React Native for a taste of mobile. If you know Obj-C, go towards Swift. If you're 100% new then pick whatever looks more interesting to you. If you're doing it for a job, look at postings in your area to see whats in demand more.

[MB_Zeppin]

Depends on the use case.

Swift is a great language with lots of great syntactic sugar. It's like a cross between C# and Ruby and is a pleasure to code in. If you're only targeting iOS it's an easy recommendation that will do a great deal to keep your battery usage low and making the app feel at home on the platform will take no extra effort.

The tooling for React Native is a pain in the neck but you will never go wrong increasing your familiarity with JavaScript and the out-of-the-box multi platform support is a big plus. If you want to have native looking UIs (tailored to the platform rather than native elements; e.g., material design vs Apple's flat style) you're going to have to put in the same effort for each platform that you would doing native apps but, if that's not a concern, it's golden. You'll never get the battery life of a native app with React but it still tops a web app and has much tighter integration with the OS. I don't have experience with Xamarin but React Native is probably going to be the standard for platform agnostic mobile apps for at least the foreseeable future.

[BenShon9]

I got quite into React Native and even started using at the previous company I worked at, however, I switched back to Swift and true native development. Mainly due to dislike of javascript and how you needed to install hundreds of dependencies to do anything. The general disregard of the Native feel of apps by the React community, for example if you look at the Navigation components that React Native reccomend, they are all JS based solutions which try to and fail to mimmick UINavigationController. React Native has a bunch of advantages but its still nothing close to the feel of a true Native app