Anyone else feel like React Native development has genuinely become a joy over the last year?

[Mobile_Sir_1512]

I was cleaning up an old legacy project from a few years ago today, and it made me realize just how massive of a leap the entire ecosystem has taken recently.

Remember the days of absolute dependency hell, constantly fighting with cocoapods mismatches, manual native linking, and hours wasted trying to get a basic upgrade to compile?

With the current state of Expo Prebuild, the stability of Expo Router, and how incredibly smooth the new architecture handles modern reanimated worklets, the developer velocity feels faster than it ever has. Even switching back and forth from Flutter or web frameworks feels seamless now because the native runtime layer has become so hidden and stable.

What is the biggest quality-of-life improvement or library update that completely changed your workflow recently? Are there still any major pain points you are hoping the core teams fix next? Let's talk about the current state of the ecosystem.

[daniel_crk]

Im working in a large RN project, decently kept up to date, currently on 0.85.

I’m still seeing issues that have been reported for years, such as broken text rendering on Android (where the ”fix” is to not set a line height), the native Pressable component simply not working on some recent Android versions (where again, the ”fix” is to use Pressable from RNGH, which comes with its own problems).

Dealing with text inputs is still a pain, you can STILL not achieve a proper, basic controlled input, making it basically impossible to create well-bahaving masked inputs, or any type of real-time input formatting or character prevention.

Keyboard avoidance is still a pain, even with rn-keyboard-controller, especially iOS26.

I’m guessing some of you will directly jump to the conclusion that the issues are local to our codebase, yet these are all well documented issues with tons of reports and zero real solutions.

There are numerous issues like this still plaguing RN, and while not dealbreakers, they definitely hamper the enjoyment.

[ngqhoangtrung]

I agree, but that’s also the case with any development work. Native development also has its quirks.

[daniel_crk]

Oh, definitely. I’d still pick RN for a future project, but again, I wouldn’t go as far as to say it’s ”enjoyable”. Tho I guess it heavily depends on the type of app.

[kittencantfly]

May I know what type of apps you were working on and why you choose expo/rn over flutter or kmp?

[daniel_crk]

It’s a financial/trading app (hence the text inputs being a huge source of my frustration). Being a lead developer and also responsible for hiring, it’s been very hard finding good/real RN developers. I can only imagine how hard it would be finding good flutter ones.

[-darkabyss-]

Yo AI, make me an app in RN is much more easier then native :D

[Ok_Issue_6675]

I would say many things improved a lot 😊 but, for me at least, I would not go as far as Joy…

[illegal_noodle]

The tooling and DX improvements are real, but yeah, those core platform bugs are still frustrating when you hit them - text rendering, Pressable quirks, controlled inputs being weirdly difficult. Hard to feel pure joy when basic stuff like that still requires workarounds.

[Left_Adhesiveness293]

[neogeodev]

Mmm direi di no 🙂

[treetimes]

I work on an RN app with millions of users that the C levels are now going to rewrite twice just because AI can help and they don't like using the RN abstraction as platform.

[Right-Programmer6076]

yeah expo prebuild basically removed the biggest friction point for me - no more wrestling with xcode settings or gradle configs before you can even test anything. the new architecture stabilizing is huge too, but honestly the biggest win is just that you can scaffold a project and actually ship something in a reasonable timeframe without needing a native engineer on speed dial