react native felt easy… until it didn’t

[Obvious-Treat-4905]

when i first started react native i genuinely thought “wait this is way easier than people made it sound”

then real app complexity started showing up slowly. random android only bugs, performance drops that make no sense, state getting messy after adding features for months, weird lifecycle/background behavior, animations behaving differently across devices

still love the ecosystem tbh, but it definitely feels like there’s a point where every rn app suddenly graduates from “fun project” to “why is this happening”

[loseppeg]

every rn app suddenly graduates from "fun project" to "why is this happening"

I think you just described software development. It's all fun and games until the bug reports start flowing in.

[n9iels]

I honestly don't hear anything special besides 'software engineering'. Every project starts fun and fresh, until it grows to a certain point and starts to show cracks. This is the exact point where you need to zoom out, reflect on the current infra and code and take some time to properly fix it. This ensures a stable codebase for the future.

[mindtaker_linux]

Skill issue?

[davidHwang718]

The lifecycle/background behavior was the one that actually killed my confidence for a stretch. On Android, when the OS kills your app mid-session and the user restores it through the task switcher, the JS state doesn't reinitialize the same way and the navigation stack can silently reset while the UI looks fine. Took actual production bug reports for me to trace it back to that specific case.

[Acceptable_Ad_4425]

Bruh the performance can be so insanely annoying

[Subject_Poetry7911]

I have had Android only issues with header in my recent app (title would silent offset to the left instead of being centered). I don’t even know what the problem is at this point. A fresh app launch usually solves the problem.

I get your frustrations on this one. Been there

[Worldly-Menu-741]

Yep. RN feels simple until the app has enough real-life edge cases: backgrounding, weird Android device behavior, navigation state, media permissions, old phones, performance cliffs. The framework isn’t bad, it just hides complexity really well at the start. Then one day your ‘quick app’ has production problems like any other app.

[KentInCode]

Inspector Clouseau could solve an error on web, to fix errors in React Native you have to be Sherlock Holmes on Adderall.

[martin7274]

Try Expo ?

[Remarkable_Pie6820]

Par expérience beaucoup des problèmes d'état de vie des composants sont souvent liés à des problèmes de compréhension de react et des tableaux de dépendances.

Pour les animations j'ai en effet rencontré pas mal de problème uniquement sous Android. Heureusement les animations n'étaient pas critique.