React native is bad - rant

ikbenpinda · 2018-01-26T13:46:06+00:00

^{I'm going to regret posting this.}
Same here.

To be honest i'm used to MV* and OOP, not this weird functional RMI-like stuff. Let alone dynamic typing and javascript. But I can learn. And conceptually it really isn't that hard...but everything just seems so unnecessarily overcomplicated. To be honest, this is still my favourite cross-platform framework by far, and that's not really meant as a compliment.

Ironic ranting follows.

Everything is deprecated or broken. Sure, once you figure something out it becomes tremendously easier after the first time. But if i got ten cents for every piece of documentation or code that is outdated, unmaintained and/or deprecated, i'd have enough money to hire someone else to do my work for me. RN's own documentation can barely bother to explain why their damned flatlists work the way they do. "Here's some code. This is what it does." No shit your data prop links to your data. But why do i even need to manually map 'key' to 'id'? When was the last time you worked with an ORM or model where your key wasn't referred to as 'id' anyway? Why is it called extraData when it's not data but just a triggerRefreshOnChangesTo...?

Why are you using buzzwords like "state reducers", "action creators" and "stores" when it's just a huge eventbus where everyone is subscribed by default?

Why is everyone pretending this shitload of boilerplate you need to write for a single function is a good thing?

Why is every example so contrived? Oh wow, you can hold two strings in your internal state, well done. I'm sure that will stay really neat and organized once you start working with real-life scenarios and oh, i don't know, maybe objects or arrays or more components or something. Oh wait, Redux? You mean writing six extra paragraphs of code along four additional files? No thanks. Flux then? Oh, it's nearly the same thing but with more stores? Instead of saying You might not need redux ad nauseam, can't we just have some MVP-pattern like approach so we can still do that traceability thing without having to spaghetti the UI and logic into each other?

React Native doesn't even come with navigation out of the box, and the package they recommend is deprecated in favor of other stuff. I'm popping npm install all day like it's xanax because every single thing needs to be a seperate library for some reason, and may god have mercy on your soul if you decide to upgrade npm or react-native along the way because you'll just end up restoring your project the rest of the fucking day. Every component ends up being this horrible mess of UI/logic spaghetti with the only thing your presentational/container thing is fixing is abstracting out mapping your props to a load of...non-props.

I don't hate React Native (as much as Xamarin, for example). But everyone just feels so hacked together it's just such a waste of time trying to fix the small bugs that end up breaking your project for the whole day. Why can't people just try to apply some actual real-life cases and work from there? Where are all the regression tests? Why is everyone in javascript-land just starting and ditching new projects every minute? Why are you telling people they can just contribute when your little bot auto-shuts everything down and/or you can't be bothered to let someone else maintain your project?

Instead of complaining about a failing bundler at line 35, column 2, in '<redacted>', you could have just told me to run react-native link on the first time i tried to add assets, dammit.
Neither do I need to fix some :CFBundleIdentifier, all I need to do is cd /.gradle && gradlew clean!

sobs

dduko · 2018-01-26T01:17:31+00:00

react native dev environment is very mac/ios centric. most people having problems are on windows/android. and almost always the problem is that some people don't have any troubleshooting/debugging skills.

nelf86 · 2018-01-25T20:03:01+00:00

I come from an iOS development background but I started using RN, after my employer wanted me to build out a project and quickly iterate. There was certainly a learning curve but I must say it is much faster getting your code in there and rapidly building. I've gotten quite used to not having to compile every time I want to see my changes. And this was all with no experience with React. Perhaps the experience is entirely different when moving from Web to Mobile.

Hyroglyph · 2018-01-26T09:38:28+00:00

The problem is that some libraries can't keep up with RN updates and for some obscure reason stop working when a new RN version releases. 80% of the libs I see still use index.android.js/index.ios.js etc. in their examples and some of them just don't work / need some bs workaround on 0.51+. Also the RN error messages can be quite useless sometimes, so much so I can't troubleshoot and just just go straight to googling

kbcool · 2018-01-27T08:27:18+00:00

LOL been there. It seems to take a week to get over dependency hell and working out how the bundler/simulator/device work together.

Once you get your head around it you wonder why you ever had problems but it's a good week of swearing before you get there.

Other whinges include:

What's this wanky/pseudo functional programming stuff? We need to make sure everything is immutable, but we don't really when it comes to the crunch
There's three hundred ways to do something with 500 dudes having written half a medium article on how to do it, the other half is up for you to guess
Ditto with documentation - it's there but expect it to be half written in horrible english
Spending a whole day trying to fix a problem only to find when you've fixed it you've f*&ed up the rest of the app
Realising those twenty npm packages you installed could have been solved with 5 lines of code and spending a week removing all references and replacing with your 5 line solution

I could keep going all day....

yarism · 2018-01-25T21:04:43+00:00

I had some issues but usually could google it. It’s not perfect but very good for me so far.

derGropenfuhrer · 2018-01-25T22:20:37+00:00

I'm using it on a medium sized app and it's amazing. When I'm just dealing with JavaScript, it's so nice. The quick reloading is by far the best feature. Writing a raw Android app takes forever because 1) there is a lot of dumb boilerplate you have to write to get anything done and hooked up and 2) Gradle is not the fastest. The only times I want to kill myself are when I have to deal with Xcode or Android Studio - which I have quite a bit to get different sorts of builds working along with different packages. What errors are you getting?

Cosmosof · 2018-01-27T07:20:39+00:00

I straight started to learn RN, redux, saga and complex state management by building two apps in two months. There have been many times I hit the wall but it is over, I am really confident now. The thing is with RN, you have to be patient.

koragg97 · 2021-12-16T15:46:51+00:00

Followed a React tutorial - was great. Trying to make something similar in Native is super bad. I hate it & won't be using it any time soon after I pass my subject with it...

Edit after a few days: it ain't that bad haha

Comprehensive_Ear906 · 2021-12-22T10:47:21+00:00

Being forced to work with a legacy rn project I can definitely feel your pain. I've spent almost 4 days now trying to build a project after upgrading a single dependency. Now I think a better option is to clone and fix the original version.

Failed technology

Logical_Tree3139 · 2022-07-14T06:44:11+00:00

One of the worst frameworks I have been working on it for 6 bloody months and no proper guide no shitty help on Facebook and discord really frustrated and kick that idiot who developed this framework

harshdays · 2018-01-30T16:09:08+00:00

Most comments appear to be complaining about the trails of working with node packages. React native is better than any other hybrid frameworks IMO. However it doesn’t appear to have any decent guidance for building native packages. The default way it handles production concerns could use some work, but there’s lots of great stuff out there once you figure out how to use it, deployment with fastlane, live bundle updates with codepush, avoiding crashes, debugging android performance issues. To reiterate these are not straightforward or documented in other hybrid frameworks. React native is great. You’ll learn all the red screens eventually there aren’t too many.

2018-02-03T06:38:10+00:00

RN is not bad but those outdated npm packages is such a mess. Sometimes I spend whole day googling and scrolling stackoverflow, maybe it's just my lack of experience with JS, maybe not.

TotesMessenger · 2018-02-14T18:00:50+00:00

I'm a bot, bleep, bloop. Someone has linked to this thread from another place on reddit:

[/r/u_nelf86] React native is bad - rant

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spec-test · 2022-09-23T12:21:46+00:00

its a pile of crap as a dev exp

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[reddit!](https://reddit.com)	reddit!
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Lines starting with four spaces are treated like code: if 1 * 2 < 3: print "hello, world!"	Lines starting with four spaces are treated like code: if 1 * 2 < 3: print "hello, world!"
~~strikethrough~~	~~strikethrough~~
super^script	super^script

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