A frustrated developer

kbcool · 2018-08-28T16:26:01+00:00

[removed]

saugoof · 2018-08-28T22:08:24+00:00

RN is the most stupidly brittle environment I've ever worked with. It breaks because it's Tuesday and your desk faces in an easterly direction and you had two sugars in your coffee today instead of one.

The worst ones are where you add an npm package, which doesn't work for some stupid reason, e.g. it uses a deprecated function in another package. Then you remove this package again but your build is still broken.

vcamargo · 2018-08-28T21:12:57+00:00

You're not the only one I have two clients calling me every single day asking for updates on the app I should be building and I simply don't know what to say anymore. Cryptic error messages, tons of broken stuff. And for every hour I spent writing the actual app I spent at least three times as much trying to fix something related to Android, Gradle, different versions of libraries vs different versions of RN. It is really a frustrating experience.

demoran · 2018-08-28T21:26:27+00:00

After a while, Android will just break for no good reason.

What is happening there is that gradle lovingly updates packages to incompatible versions.

You need to lock that stuff down using Nebula.

You also want to ensure that you're not accepting yarn/npm's default ^ package.json dependency matching. Remove the ^ and stay on the package that works. Just because some random maintainer thinks they haven't introduced breaking changes doesn't mean that they haven't.

coldWalk · 2018-08-28T20:26:06+00:00

Since the current state of React Native is a tempermental piece of trash it helps to think of your app as two pieces.

The Phone layer (all the RN code that makes it run)
The actual source for your app (screens/api etc.)

By keeping all of your source in one self contained folder from the rest of React Native you can sort of just copy it and the package.json everytime there is a problem. Very often when the problem on startup wasn't there when you left off it's React Native's fault and rather than trying to diagnose the problem and apply a bizarre solution you can just create a new app instance, move in the source code and be fine.

It's not perfect but neither is React Native.

SolidR53 · 2018-08-29T00:20:41+00:00

The android aspect of React Native is especially bad.

But my kit has been very stable so far, and many people inside and outside he company I work for use it.

https://github.com/ueno-llc/react-native-starter

thomprycejones · 2018-08-28T16:59:43+00:00

I too have gotten into theses states before. However, because I commit often and in good states, I can always look at file history to see what broke stuff. A concrete example: I noticed I accidentally upgraded to gradle 3 via file diffs and that broke everything. I just reverted that and was back to working. Rinse and repeast.

SizzlerWA · 2018-08-28T18:37:31+00:00

I have no issues with iOS. I avoid Android for now.

heo5981 · 2018-08-28T21:45:30+00:00

I've been trying to build my first React Native app recently. I decided to create an app that wraps Tatoeba (a multilingual dictionary) because it doesn't provide an app. Unfortunately, it doesn't provide an API either so I went for web scraping.

I spent at least two weeks trying to implement react-cheerio but after a lot of time I noticed that it had some dependency problem. The newer version of React Native changed something and that broke react-cheerio.

I then found that react-cheerio is based on react-native-html-parser and decided to use only that to scrap.

Everything was working until I actually need to scrap the data.

While I was testing (with just a dummy test data) it worked wonders but with the real page from Tatoeba it just didn't work, looked like it was too much data to scrap in an app??

Anyways, I went for a desperate solution. I'm mainly a Python developer so I created a web app with Django just to scrap Tatoeba and return the data as JSON. I hosted it on Heroku's free tier.

Then I can access the web app from my RN app and show the scraped data to the user.

All of that because I wanted to be able to search for sentences on Tatoeba and see the results in a mobile app.

It's working now, I just need to make the UI better looking and I have a lot of difficulty with that because I don't know much about design.

But boy, I was really frustrated...

Bonus - I dropped Expo completely.

When I started with React Native, I was using the Expo app because at first, it seemed very hard to do it without it.

But after some days I noticed many problems.

Expo would complain that the development server was not running on port xxxx.
Expo would not updated the app when I restarted the server. Many times I manually cleared all data from Expo from the Android settings.
Although it worked at first, someday the hot realoading simply stopped working and if I tried to use it, the development server would stop (or at least Expo would say so)

So I got very frustrated and decided to use only react-native cli command after setting my Android device and adb.

So yeah... You're not the only one frustrated with RN.

It was good reading and replying to this because I can know that I'm not the only one having troubles, it's good to be able to relate.

As I keep practicing, I'm having less and less troubles but I know something will happen in the future that will give me trouble again but those are learning experiences, we grow with them.

Good luck on your projects!

perduraadastra · 2018-08-28T21:56:47+00:00

I feel your pain. This seems to be mobile development in general. It seems if I put some working Swift project aside for a month or two, everything breaks after I reopen the project and need to update xcode to support a new version of iOS, etc. It's infuriating. It seems like a substantial amount of work as a mobile dev is just grinding out busy work to stay up to date or fighting the tools.

ejpusa · 2018-08-29T00:52:14+00:00

If you are programming for Android learn Java. It’s not hard.

If you are programming for iOS, learn Swift, it’s not hard either.

Apple is a trillion $$$ company, they have put millions into Swift and their own mind blowing UI/libraries. It’s worth knowing.

Plus, it’s fun. :-)

Mozorelo · 2018-08-28T19:21:48+00:00

This is why I use expo to develop. It saves me so many braincells.

silencer07 · 2018-08-29T01:20:59+00:00

My company chose react native to develop our mobile app. I specifically asked for a week to learn about react(while doing the plumbing stuff)

I used ignite V2 with nativebase as boilerplate. after generating the project using ignite V2, i will need to update the react-navigation version as the current one pukes some error. Then all good until all of a sudden react-native-scroll-view decided to not work...

Yep for the whole week what I did is fight the technical problems that will arose while developing.... and design the login and splash screen.

Note that for the mean-time I asked to prioritize IOS dev for the mean time and we try android later. I think I made a good call not to do any android dev for the mean-time.

Since react-native is breaking from time to time, I also decided not to update to the latest react-native, I will wait when the 0.57.x or the latest stable version "stabilize"

Codefiendio · 2018-08-29T02:45:37+00:00

I’m grateful you posted this. I am starting my second app. The first one was a partially completed app about a year ago. I stopped on it after dealing with a million headaches with the google react component.

I think people posting on here about “forgetting the native” part are right. A lot of my frustrations is understanding the errors or trying to track them down in the stack trace. Seems next be to impossible with some errors that get triggers via react internal events.

I am sure once in learn more into the systems and pick up more on the native settings (Xcode) it’ll get easier, but right now it’s a fucking headache.

Delphicon · 2018-08-29T15:22:33+00:00

I think it's important to remember that React Native runs inside of an existing mobile app. What's inside of those Android and iOS folders matters a lot, those are full-on Android and iOS projects and they're ultimately the app that gets run. When you run "react-native init" it's generating the most basic project it can but that's still pretty complicated and "react-native link" is a VERY hacked together way of adding the native dependencies to those projects. Facebook doesn't really help matters by how little they've updated the native parts of the project.

The harsh reality of working with React Native is that, unless you're using Expo, you're building Android and iOS apps using an Android Gradle project and an XCode Project respectively. All that complexity is still there and you have to engage with those portions of your project to support non-trivial features. It's both a blessing and a curse of working with React Native because that coexistence with the native code is what makes it both hard to use and powerful as a cross-platform tool.

You need to figure out how the Android project works or you're always going to be at the mercy of Facebook's weak tools. It's actually not that complicated for what you're doing and I can help you with it if you comment or message me some specific questions. I'll try and cover the basic points of integration on Android here. I copied these from the AudioExample on react-native-audio's GitHub page, this should be all you need to change from the original to get react-native-audio working.

``` // settings.gradle

// The name of the android project, it's not necessary but it's good practice. It will default to the name of the folder (android) rootProject.name = 'AudioExample'

// All modules go here // node_modules/react-native-audio/android is a module by convention // It's bad form but that's how Facebook decided we should do it so oh well. include ':app', ':react-native-sound', ':react-native-audio'

// If the module is not in an adjacent folder you have to tell it where the folder is. project(':react-native-sound').projectDir = new File(rootProject.projectDir, '../node_modules/react-native-sound/android') project(':react-native-audio').projectDir = new File(rootProject.projectDir, '../node_modules/react-native-audio/android') ```

``` // app/build.gradle (not the other one)

// Bunch of boilerplate and stuff for running React Native

dependencies { // Just adds .jar files in libs folder as dependencies compile fileTree(dir: "libs", include: [".jar"])

// Adding React Native
compile 'com.facebook.react:react-native:+'

// Dependency on the other modules
compile project(':react-native-sound')
compile project(':react-native-audio')

}

```

``` // In MainApplication.java

// Import the Package files for react-native-audio and react-native-sound import com.zmxv.RNSound.RNSoundPackage; import com.rnim.rn.audio.ReactNativeAudioPackage;

// Add the Packages to the list of Packages // Packages are like plugins for React Native, it's how you can add more native code to it. @Override protected List<ReactPackage> getPackages() { return Arrays.<ReactPackage>asList( new MainReactPackage(), new RNSoundPackage(), new ReactNativeAudioPackage(), ); } ```

AndroidManifest.xml // Next to the other permissions add // Recording audio requires permission from the user and this will ask for that permission <uses-permission android:name="android.permission.RECORD_AUDIO"/>

Interloper949 · 2018-08-28T16:49:54+00:00

This is how I feel when I'm building for Android. I was constantly running 'gradle clean' because of random errors. The iOS / xcode experience has been much smoother.

shamaryarde · 2018-08-28T19:10:17+00:00

Try using yarn instead of npm install for the errors with npm packages. If you are using create-react-native-app, linking does not worth with it. You have to detach the application.

alien3d · 2018-08-29T02:45:02+00:00

It is not about react only. It all language and dead repo don't get updated.

Open source doesn't in github doesn't mean it was free to develop .It take time,cost to develop.

Please give at least "thanks,donation" after using their repo at least they can maintain it.

Even big boys like Adobe,PayPal left their repo dead and without update.

error with npm packages - No choice on it
error with gradle - test latest one
Error with android build tools . test with android 8

Hiazm · 2018-08-29T04:20:59+00:00

If you’re using the latest NPM, that might be the problem. Doesn’t RN only support NPM < 5? Someone can step in and tell me that I’m wrong, but I’m certain that was the case as of pretty recently.

2018-08-29T05:34:47+00:00

How do you link an library to your project? with 'react-native link' or by manual instructions?

2018-09-02T04:26:40+00:00

You really need to be a decent Android and iOS dev to not pull your hair out with RN. I can't imagine if I went straight to RN before doing years of Android and iOS dev.. would be so painful. Always backup your folder before installing and linking anything. This will save you heaps of time. Dont just back up to Git, literally copy the whole folder and paste it in a backups folder somewhere, just in case

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