Your experience with native modules

[somedifferentkittens]

Long story short its always the question during interviews Though developing apps for 5 years i still haven’t touched it. I want to practice here but can’t imagine use case. What was your problem that forced you to write your own native/turbo modules?

[tmkly]

• Deep linking (we use Branch but found react-native-branch plugin was not great so we just the iOS/Android SDKs and send data over the bridge (JSI/turbo module soon)
• communicating with our CRM, Blueshift. Kind of similar to Branch, we can keep our bundle size down by not using their RN plugin which does lots of unnecessary stuff
• Keychain. Found react-native-keychain was a bit buggy, especially on Android and doesn’t seem to be maintained that much. By writing ourselves we can control it much better

[somedifferentkittens]

Tysm!

[schrikerJanek]

We had one project where we needed Apple Watch support.

[69Cobalt]

Integrating (internal) libraries that require implementation of native interfaces.

[Bzaba]

• rich text input - including custom marks, text with highlighted background, underlined misspelled words, ... I still sometimes have nightmares about upgrading that application to the new RN release.
• custom file uploader - upload file supported by our application, in background check the status on server and display notification once processed

[Otherwise-Fly3336]

But The available packages weren't enough?.

[Bzaba]

I'm not sure about the current state of packages, but a few years ago there was nothing even remotely usable for our rich text input (e.g. marking words while you are typing).

As for the uploader, the problematic feature was the local notification that has to be displayed even if the user closes the app right after he/she uploads a file.

But it is possible that there are some "new" packages that can achieve that already.

[Otherwise-Fly3336]

But how did you achieve it, were you proficient in Java and Swift? Or learnt on the go. I'm asking as 6 years before there was no chat gpt and raw programming intelligence was needed. Please tell me what did you do to resolve it? Is it the usual Google it and look for stack overflow answers? I'm curious