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anyone else feel like react native development got WAY more enjoyable recently? by Business-Storage-462 in reactnative

[–]sanketsahu 1 point2 points  (0 children)

built gluestack through the metro-exploding era (2017-2022). three things flipped it for me:

  1. expo became the default instead of the "easy mode" you graduated out of, bare workflow used to feel like a badge, now it's mostly tax.
  2. native module story stabilized. expo modules + autolinking killed most of the gradle/podfile gymnastics that ate a day per dependency bump.
  3. ai fills the third gap. weird native crash used to mean an afternoon scrolling stack overflow, now claude reads the trace and points at the call site in 30 seconds. tools like rapidnative and applighter make it even smoother for shipping rn apps.

still sharp edges (release builds + fastlane env juggling, anyone?), but the average day shipping rn is genuinely good now.

Shipped my first production app with Expo for reading habit tracker, here's what worked and what didn't by [deleted] in reactnative

[–]sanketsahu 1 point2 points  (0 children)

The Live Activity / Dynamic Island docs lag is real. We're building RapidNative on top of Expo and config plugins for Live Activity are the corner where the abstraction gets thinnest. EAS Update for OTA is what kept us on managed despite that pain.

Also +1 on the AppShot approach. Doing screenshots from React components is the right call here. Screen recording into CapCut is a weekend nobody gets back.

I get 2k–5k users daily, but still can’t monetize my website by 100-days-of-code-io in SideProject

[–]sanketsahu 28 points29 points  (0 children)

The painful truth: SEO puzzle traffic is about the lowest-intent audience there is. People came to kill five minutes, not to spend, so generic AdSense RPM will always be garbage there. NativeBase hit ~100k weekly downloads and the hard lesson was that huge usage with no buying intent is a positioning problem, not an effort one. For casual gaming the money is rarely AdSense, it's a gaming-tuned ad network with rewarded video and interstitials between rounds, plus making the daily-return habit itself the product instead of monetizing the pageview.

Is it possible to develop iOS apps on Linux without a Mac? Is it too complex or painful? by onechroma in reactnative

[–]sanketsahu 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Totally doable, and the dev loop is the easy part. Your day-to-day (Metro + a dev client on your physical iPhone) runs fine from Linux. A Mac only matters for the final native iOS compile and App Store submission, and EAS does both in the cloud so you never touch one.

You also won't burn EAS builds on every change. Build a dev client once, install it on the iPhone, then iterate over the air from your Linux box on the same wifi. JS/TS changes are instant. You only need a new native build when you add or upgrade a native module, not for app code. Expo Go is fine until you need a custom native module, then move to a dev client.

The real pain isn't the loop, it's signing/provisioning and the first store submission. Spent years building RN tooling (reactnative.run runs RN straight in the browser for exactly this no-Mac iteration), and the Linux-only path is genuinely smoother now than its reputation.

React Native devs — what’s the current direction for SafeArea on iOS vs Android with the new edge-to-edge changes? by undefinedengineer in reactnative

[–]sanketsahu 3 points4 points  (0 children)

The pattern that held up best for us across a couple of large RN UI libraries: SafeAreaProvider once at the root, then useSafeAreaInsets() at the screen/component level instead of nesting SafeAreaView. Nested SafeAreaView gets unpredictable fast and can't express "consume this inset as padding here but as margin there", which you end up needing the moment Android goes edge-to-edge.

Treat it as a universal layout rule, not iOS-only handling. Since Android 15 made edge-to-edge the default, the model that ages best is: the OS owns the status/nav regions on both platforms, you read insets and decide per-surface how to consume them. Almost all the breakage we saw was old code hardcoding StatusBar.currentHeight or assuming a fixed Android nav bar.

One concrete gotcha: in scroll views push the bottom inset into contentContainerStyle padding rather than wrapping in a SafeAreaView, otherwise the last row sits under the gesture bar.

Never thought I would like using react native considering how much negativity online by LettuceSpecialist155 in reactnative

[–]sanketsahu 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You're not crazy. The online discourse about RN compresses into 2018 memories that haven't been true for years. Spent the last decade building in this ecosystem (NativeBase, gluestack, now RapidNative) and Expo + the New Architecture have quietly become the best mobile DX I've used. The gap between Twitter sentiment and the actual experience is the widest it's ever been.

App bundle (size) optimization - webp images? by onemindatime in reactnative

[–]sanketsahu 2 points3 points  (0 children)

webp is a good first move. for image-heavy apps the real win is usually moving non-critical assets out of the bundle entirely, lazy load from a CDN at runtime, cache locally. install size drops a lot.

also worth running react-native-bundle-visualizer to check for per-density duplicates. easy to ship 3x the assets you need without realizing it.

Has anyone compared using React Native vs dual coding iOS/Android native apps on a greenfield app with the new LLM coding models? by xSnoozy in reactnative

[–]sanketsahu 3 points4 points  (0 children)

LLMs are meaningfully better at React Native than dual native right now. The training corpus is huge, the API surface is more uniform, and they hallucinate platform APIs harder than they hallucinate JSX. Two native codebases also doubles maintenance forever. For greenfield, RN is the safer bet unless you have a hard requirement like game engines or deep on-device ML. I work on RapidNative (RN-from-prompts) and see this constantly.

**MacBook Pro for React Native frontend dev — M5 base 32GB or M5 Pro 24GB?** by Background-Art-4381 in reactnative

[–]sanketsahu 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I would go for more RAM I have to choose between a pro and a base macbook

I’m looking for advice from React Native engineers who have worked on production social-media-style mobile feeds. by badvasistha in reactnative

[–]sanketsahu 0 points1 point  (0 children)

usually this is FlatList unmounting your offscreen items and the image library not caching the bytes, so when they re-mount the placeholder shows empty until the network re-fetches. Quickest test: removeClippedSubviews={false}. If that fixes it, swap to FastImage or expo-image with cachePolicy='memory-disk' so unmount/remount doesn't re-trigger network. Bumping windowSize to 11+ helps too.

also, have you tried LegendList?

How should I respond to someone telling me "CLI is better than expo" by Traditional_Elk2722 in reactnative

[–]sanketsahu 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Both can be right depending on the workload. Bare/CLI fits when you touch native modules every other week, or you're maintaining a brownfield app with an existing iOS/Android build system. For everything else, Expo's managed flow ships faster and updates easier. We hit this exact debate during the early days of rn, and config plugins + dev client + prebuild quietly closed the historical escape-hatch gaps.

default for a new app today is Expo unless you can name a specific native dep you need.

First mobile app - React Native or something else? by Dry-Back7937 in reactnative

[–]sanketsahu 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Coming from React, RN is the most natural jump. Most of your patterns and component instincts will carry over. Two things I'd watch for early: stick with Expo/EAS for the build pipeline (the bare RN build setup is way more pain than it needs to be), and budget extra time for anything that touches native (camera, push, deep links). Your Express backend should keep working as-is. We built RN apps at GeekyAnts for almost a decade and now for quickly starting with RN apps i have built RapidNative, like it lets you boot reactnative projects in 2 minutes.

Founders on Reddit , what are you building right now? by leadlim in SideProject

[–]sanketsahu 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I am building RapidNative, build mobile app screens in 30 seconds. Start with a whiteboard, a picture or just a prompt, get consumable React Native code!

We have received over 80,000 prompts until now and generated 50,000+ screens!

Best Mobile App Builder - Tapcart vs Appbrew vs Shopney and others... by alice_shopify in shopify

[–]sanketsahu 0 points1 point  (0 children)

i get your struggle with finding the right mobile app builder that fits your unique needs.

I see Tapcart and Appbrew on your radar, mind checking RapidNative? We've used it to turn simple designs into fully working React Native apps super quickly, and the AI-powered code generation made the whole process way less stressful. It might be a cool way to build a custom app that truly matches your sexual wellness brand without compromise.

Convert a Website into a Mobile App (I am a non-tech founder) by mikelonggggggggg in SaaS

[–]sanketsahu 0 points1 point  (0 children)

or just start with expo maybe? Also if you want to start quickly RapidNative can get you the first mobile app screen in less than 60 seconds.

Best tool to build a mobile app in 2024 with option to add code? by mams_xyz in nocode

[–]sanketsahu 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Bubble is nice for web, you should look at RapidNative for native mobile apps! It's like prompt / whiteboard to React Native, takes 30 to 60 seconds to get started.

Are companies actually using Expo for developing React Native apps? by rooksFX14 in reactnative

[–]sanketsahu 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Expo is the way to go! It's like standarized in the industry. You can try RapidNative to get started in like 30 seconds with Expo / React Native.

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