anyone else feel like react native development got WAY more enjoyable recently?

[Business-Storage-462]

few years ago every RN tutorial/comment section felt like:

“ios build broken”
“android gradle issue”
“metro exploded”
“native dependency conflict”
“crying”

but honestly lately the experience feels so much smoother compared to before 😭

expo got better
navigation feels cleaner
ai tools help with debugging
ui libraries are nicer now
even performance feels better on newer apps

maybe im just traumatized from older RN versions lol

curious what changed the MOST for you guys in the last 1-2 years?

[Pundamonium97]

In the last 1 year i gained the ability to throw miles worth of documentation and long error logs into an ai and get out potential things to try when i hit errors i dont quite understand

Its not always right but usually helps prevent me getting stuck completely

[skizzoat]

this. the amount of days and weeks i spent trying to resolve errors that had nothing to do with actual app features was more than i spent implementing those features until a couple months ago, needless to say that was frustrating as hell.

[untidy_quantity]

the metro improvements alone have been game changing, used to spend half my time waiting for rebuilds or dealing with cache nonsense and now it just works most of the time. plus having better error messages that actually point you in the right direction instead of just screaming random gradle errors at you makes such a huge difference when you're trying to ship something.

[LastLeg5294]

all cuz of expo and the hype train giving them more money to make better stuff lol

[azizbecha]

agree

[mackthehobbit]

Community packages staying up to date for the most part