I think about this article a lot... 

Expo doesn’t get nearly as much recognition as it deserves

Expo got a lot of hate, even back in 2018 when I started doing React. Apparently it's always those "native" guys. I love expo, always been an expo fan, always love how they think of their plugins, and how they listen about their users. I'm surprised they don't cost $299 annually to use. Thanks theo, I really dislike expo haters. This shit is too free.

I used to write apps with Cordova, they had the same idea that Expo+RN does but without assuming a framework and letting the render happen in a webview. Worked fine, and even back like 7-9 years ago it was fast enough that most devices had a native-like experience if you knew how to build a good SPA. React Native as far as I've been playing with is the next level where you are delivering a native experience where your domain logic can remain the good old JS level that pretty much everyone understands.

I've spent the last year ish in React Native/Expo. It is crazy how much it does with what seems like such minimal effort because it usually just works everywhere. Expo is a game changer though, from handling submitting to platforms with EAS to their new Expo Router. Expo Router is still super early but I think it's a really good shift.

Devs: Don't like a certain piece of software Theo: Misunderstoooood!

I was put off from using RN by that Airbnb post, but thanks to a tight deadline, I had to still go with RN as it was using some concepts and tools I’m already familiar with from the web. The DX with bare RN setup was a bit of a headache, but I was able to get through it all, nowadays I’d go with Expo by default as it’s matured a lot! With Flutter, you don’t really know when big G is going to rug pull it, they kind of ditched everything to build a whole new ecosystem for Fuchsia and who knows how that will go? Seems like an unsafe bet.

... says the ReactNative dev ...

Expo has gotten really amazing in the past couple years. I came back to it a couple months ago and was blown away by the progress they've made. Not using it seems crazy now!

Expo 49 is already in beta and should come out this week, maybe next week 😊

I would only consider RN or Capacitor for any mobile projects these days.

I legitimately don't understand how anyone uses React Native. I've tried using it three times now, every time giving it a solid week to convince me. And I just don't understand. It simply doesn't seem to work. Everything is hilariously buggy. Nothing lays out the same on web and android. About 50% of the react-native packages people publish simply don't work or have so little information that it's not even possible to tell whether they work or what exactly they were even supposed to do in the first place. Another 25% don't work cross-platform (what's the point of publishing a package for a cross-platform framework that doesn't work cross-platform???). The expo packages seem to be pretty high quality, though their API design could sometimes be better. But they're definitely fine. Not without their rough edges though, but at least they put in effort. The documentation for a lot of even core components is hilariously insufficient. Even including very core components you have to use all the time. Not that the core components even work all the time. E.g. as far as I can tell, FlatList just simply doesn't lay out its items correctly on Android. Any error might as well be impossible to debug with how terrible (and frequently simply incorrect) the error messages are. You get bangers like: "Crash without any error or log whatsoever" and "A text node cannot be a child of a " (Ok, where? What text? Hello?? Do you expect me to look through my whole codebase to find where there's a random space somewhere?). And because everyone just accepts that there is no actual systematic way to debug these errors, suggestions online usually range from "just build your own that acutally works" to "try randomly permuting your source code until it works". Wonderful. From everything I can tell, React Native is just simply not fit for any purpose (and obviously never will be).

After working for years in React Native. I would be cautious to recommend it, it has some insane benefits like OTA updates, despite that you can make pretty much anything in RN and make it look good, RN unfortunately because of how it works makes it really easy to built janky uis. And your experience as React dev working with animations will hardly translate to RN, so that’s going to be another challenge. Every update cycle is hell, working with monorepos is still ass, native modules debugging is bad. In order to install package for it to work you better use expo as your package manager layer because it knows better than pnpm what’s best. There are a lot of challenges with RN, a lot of pains and things that will make your hair gray. But if you need delivery speed in hours not days RN is a good choice

BlueSky is built with React Native, and the pace they're pushing out updates and moving forward is pretty amazing!

The resulting binary of react native is huge, that’s the reason I skipped react native. Flutter on the other hand comes close to swift/kotlin built app. I was an Android and iOS dev using Java/ObjC, for me it’s more interesting to choose Flutter. React Native just doesn’t feel out of the box.

Since i dont like react i will talk from the experience of a vue dev. When i have to go mobile (or desktop app), i choose PWA. Is not as limiting as people think. We now have Push on IOS, web apis to tap into hardware are really powerful and people most of the time dont grasp that javascript can actually do alot of stuff with external hardware from a web context without relying on calling native functions written in java/swift. The only thing that is a grunge for me is that is harder to develope an app that works on a desktop browser and also make it feel native when is viewed from a mobile screen (capacitor or framework7 help alot here). So yeah. I am pleased and my clients are pleased too

just show them the top 500 non gaming apps on the app stores and you'll see that most of them is built using react native.

It's like you absolutely never wrote anything beyond 3 screen app on mobile. React Native is nightmare to maintain. I had 3 projects written in n where the cost of upgrading app to new version of RN costed more than rewriting the whole app to flutter. Aditionaly Apps in flutter are safer, have order of magnitude less bugs, you have ability to create UI on a pixel level, platform integration is done properly etc. There is no case for react native. Even if your team is 100% js devs it's easier for them to learn dart and flutter than learn react native alone.

A lot of apps can be made in webview with no issues. Text, forms, images, simple animations, no one will see a difference between web and native framework. Even if you need more native apis you can use adapters to expose it to web.

I got the point. I got new guy in my office said to don't use lodash since there is some article said it not good because of build size. then I read more about lodash found out it already has a way to optimize it.

Expo is straight up wizardry. I can not recommend it enough!

Never had a problem with react native and I’ve built iOS apps in objective C and react native.

This is an awesome video! Thank you for sorting these opinions out... they are hard to deal with sometimes when you're called out for using React...

Engineers always push hard to change directions and invest on new apps because they're too bored. this is crazy lol. Tobi's luke tweet summarises it up

I hate, this is not a heavy term i really _h_a_t_e_ the term "sunsetting". Just stop sugar coating things, just be an adult and call things for what they are - at least use the established "discontinuing"

Having spent the last 2 weeks working on a side project using RN, I can vouch that using it was a really nice and streamlined experience. A pet peeve of mine is the declarative nature of design in native android development. Being able to use tailwind css to design your app is SUCH a underrated benefit. Apart from that the ability to take the majority of stuff you know from React and being able to port it to RN is another plus as well. The only things I don't like are: poor documentation. Maybe I'm going into it expecting too much after I've used the new React docs, but either way the RN docs, especially the ones on expo router are not good. While the content and details might be there, they are not structed in a good way at all. You continuously have to jump back and forth between 3 to 4 websites to do basic stuff like add a new screen with a tab icon at the bottom.

I'm a full time RN developer and with our team we ejected the app from expo 4-5 months ago and it became much faster and flexible to use. Though there were a few expo plugins that could have made some tasks a bit easier but it's definitely not worth moving to expo

I still hear this article cited even today. Says a lot about today's developers :)

The only source of popularity of React Native is the popularity of React as a web framework and Javascript as a language. The main downside of Flutter on the other hand is the new language that you need to learn - Dart. Other than that Flutter is much better than RN in almost all regards. I tried them both. Flutter is just better on so many levels. But I understand that there is so many React/JS guys and they naturally gravitate towards RN.

I may eventually get to native IOS or Android development but Expo has been such a supercharger. The introduction of config plugins makes Expo a great choice 99% of the time.

Damn, I remember reading this article 6 years ago

Great video. This sunsetting react native article, is like the one an amazon employee wrote recently about serverless not being that great. His article speaks about the monolithic approach being better. Clearly for the amazon prime video encoding. But sadly the article just gives off vibes of amazon cussing its own products.

🙌🏽 glad you mentioned this and React’s changes mainly being for RN. I think that’s been my biggest gripe in FE development. A lot of these “wars” don’t even know the ethos of the codebase. React’s changes for nearly now a decade was to make react a platform agnostic language where it doesn’t matter where the view is, if you know react, you could build on it. Glad you also shredded the airbnb article that no one who shares it clearly reads and elated you highlighted the lords work the expo team has been doing to move RN to be a best-in-class tool.

May I know why "mobile development" is less adopted every year? I'm a full stack web dev and I'm trying to expand my knowledge into mobile app development, I really interested in React Native but seem like there might not be as much career opportunity as I might expected

Expo's development-client lets you avoid ejecting and is pretty cool but since it's kind of new, you don't see many tutorials. Spent the past few months using it and I got a lot accomplished.

Flutter is superior in every single metric it's also cleaner and much more productive

Thank you for your service!!!! I hated this article when it was written!!!!

To me it's infuriating that RN still doesn't have display:grid and working autocentering. There, I said it.

Thank you for supporting react native btw

I have very conflicting feelings for React Native. I want to use it more, but at the same time I don't. I think it has more to do with the hellscape of a codebase that I've inherited rather than React Native itself though.

also airbnb is in a big mess, not going to listen to them at this point.

I suddenly felt dejavu watching this video. Was there some similar video on the channel or it's just The Matrix is weird? :D

I MIGHT be weird, but the in-sentence cuts to cut out dead air seem a bit grating in this video. The roughly 10 seconds after 3:30 are the biggest offender. The audio artifacts from those cuts make it a tad harder to listen to than I'm used to with your videos. Obviously I don't know how the raw footage was, and if and how it could have been improved, but I would rather leave that bit of criticism than not saying anything 😅

Great takes on the cultural friction. Native mobile dev is full of engineers who want to work on frontend but hate JavaScript. I'm sure many of the mobile engineers joined AirBnB specifically because they have a strong pedigree of native mobile development (e.g. Lottie).

Thanks for this. I'm starting building an app in React Native.. it's a bit of a headache, there's far less training for Native and what is there is not that great. Then when you find one, the dependencies aren't up to date and raise a ton of errors.. I shall push on!

i think it's extremely important to learn the native sides (android and ios) before even touching react native. im not a big fan of expo since it adds a REALLY thick abstraction layer to my app which is hard to debug/look into. expo is like a cage which limits the powers of react native. i have once setup my app with expo and soon enough i had to eject because expo wasn't providing the things i needed anymore. finally being able to change actual NATIVE code was freedom but expo haunted the project til the last day. i had to refactor the whole application into a bare react native project and i haven't had any problems since then. additionally, you can write native modules by yourself instead of relying on (no longer) maintained community libraries all the way.

I remember that article. I bet they regret it now.

We use React Native for our app Solo. It’s been great for us to build quickly and deliver OTA updates. I doubt most people would know it’s not a “native app” and we’ve done barely any optimisation.

Is anything going on in Android? Yeah, Jetpack Compose is one of the best DX and performant UI frameworks available right now. It's development philosophy is based on modern React, hooks, and function components. There's actually a blogger who made a dictionary been React Native APIs and Jetpack Compose APIs and there's a comparable API for every single paradigm. It's fantastic and comparably makes SwiftUI look clunky af.

Can someone quickly explain why I would choose React Native over Flutter? Take React familiarity away. Assume I know nothing about both Flutter and React. I have to learn both from the start. Would you still recommend React Native over Flutter, and why?

I don't do much frontend but the way you've described it has me thinking React Native makes JS to native APIs like Python is to C libs with Numpy & friends

I'm glad Airbnb wrote this article, because then I learned Swift and it's my favorite lang

I remember starting to work with React Native with Android Studio and stuff many years ago and it was soo cumbersome that I quitted. Then I found about Astro and it looked like it improved the DX a lot but I never tried to get into React Native again but I would def go with it again if I need to.

Yea, but react native produces like 60 mb apk for the simplest app.

I would not be surprised if more companies will drop React Native and go full on native or start using Compose Multiplatform / KMM due to it's ability to easily bridge native stuff with Compose/KMM

I would like to see Theo compare React Native to Ionic React, since I don’t see many people talking about Ionic although they dropped Cordoba and are now using Capacitor

A mobile dev, I get the point about expo and all that.... But native is native.... And React Native is not.... Its good no doubt... But not what I will want to try... Same for most of the Native Devs I know... They prefer switching to Flutter then touching React Native

interesting video, but theo, did you not read that one article that airbnb wrote about react native?

This video totally changed my view of React Native. Thanks!

Boom you hit this on the nail! Awesome job!!

While I've used RN and really liked it, I think it's too easy to work with. For example, my university mobile app uses it and it's a MESS, things are flashing on the screen, sometimes it will log you out for no good reason, the app is slow, and the list goes on. It feels like the developers just wanted to ship as fast as they could without thinking if that was the best solution to the problem, and now we have a pile of code that is barely hanging together.

react native is great just that debugging is really hell with the lack of info regarding where the fck or which code break stuffs

Hi 👋 native android developer here. Cross platform development is great and we also have a number of cross platform technologies to share code between platforms RN is really the last option for us in this space - not because any uninstantiated hatred towards JS - but because of the lack of first class support from the native platforms themselves (from Google and Apple) Native development is unavoidable - sure there are packages to deal with everything you can think of - but not all mobile developers work on greenfield apps with such use cases. Most enterprise mobile development use cases are about integrating with bespoke proprietary native APIs that doesn't expose RN/flutter plugin, and developers end up writing these integrations in native languages anyways - and to throw in a third toolchain (the web) into the mix just introduces too many moving parts.

Interesting to see. Perfect timing as I'm looking to build a new mobile app.

I hope there will be SvelteNative soon

Expo is the best!

Ex Android Dev here. I’ve spent ~8 years doing exclusively it as a day job. In 2019 there were still a planty of projects based on java 1.7 and android mess 🤢. Kotlin was (and still is) fun, but even then devs used to write java in kotlin. It requires to write so much code to get anything up and running and also to support different sdk versions. Switching to RN was the best decission as I can be productive with TS and existing libraries, no need to use trillion of abstraction layers. Writing native modules in swift / kotlin where necessary can also be fun. Zero problems with performance that we were not been able to solve.

No Theo. There is actually a good reason for not using React Native. I’m sure the majority of Swift applications could be written in RN, but should they be? If you know Swift is there a point?

If it weren't for expo, React Native would have been a joke now.

for those who already know react learning react native is much much easy !!😃

Hey, first impression of the vid (5 seconds in): nice audio processing, feelin’ crisp!

I needed to hear this today.

Flutter is best.

I'd wager that most who hate on Native have never shipped mobile prod code in their life

React Native is awesome man

After reading their post I would’ve thought the main downside that was just about their organization was first render time. But I don’t know anything about it. So what they say about it not being ok for initial start screens and deep links isn’t valid anymore ? Can you point me to interesting ressources on those topics ?

100% with you. Great Work. Amazing!!!

What about Meta itself not building Threads app using React native 😢 ?

react native, expo, ionic... i've tried all of them multiple times and i've always had an endless amount of different errors that lead me to give up on those tools.

Kinda besides the point, but I've got to admit I actually enjoyed their linting rules as a beginner, I learnt a lot from trying to understand them. But yeah, most of my junior colleagues back then just felt suffocated.

What's your take on Ionic and Capacitor? Do you think it's a good alternative to React Native?

When i start learning SwiftUI i feel it like React Native, just with the difference that is strongly typed and somethings are more tricky to reproduce like Ref

around 7mins mark - he said mobile app are less adaptive .. what does it mean? is there any data supporting that?

You sound very emotional

Why not just do React with Capacitor?

I'm a full stack web dev and I still prefer Flutter ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Upgrading version react native break all in the project 😂, so painfull

Theo we have to be honest tho, yes the releases are fast, but the development experience is a pain in the ass. At my company we used it for 1.5 year without expo and i would never reconsider using it. bugs difficult to spot, the devtools are a joke, the difference between android and ios makes the development harder on certain packages. Is Expo better, maybe, but still is almost the same clunky experience and the main reason why someone would not want to use it is for the same reason companies prefer to avoid aws and google cloud, cause is proprietary to amazon and google where for Expo you still have to rely on their servers for the builds. Is the same for Flutter, is google and we know google. I actually love writing in react also in RN but is everything else around the problem.

"Why are you using react native bro? just make 2 completely different codebases for android and ios and manage the build dependencies and deployments, along with infrastructure for OTA if you need it" and more shit takes you can tell are said by people in big companies 😄 In general between flutter and react native, I would take react native most of the time, flutter is a mess for me to understand and build from how the syntax is, besides there is nothing quite like expo, picked it up for an android and ios app when the SDK was in version 35, and upgrading up to 48 was a breeze. There were reasons why you wouldnt want to use expo or would have needed to eject from the managed workflow, namely if you needed something native that didnt have expo bindings but now after they refactored their build process and such... like, there really isnt a really compelling reason to not use Expo 95% of the time. If you are big enough to have a dedicated android and ios team, yeah they will perform better and be optimized better, but if you dont and still need to ship mobile apps.... well there is a reason flutter, ionic, react native and others exist

Makes sense

But what about embedded systems and desktop support seems limited.

What about user experience ( speed )

I agree with the feedback on the topic, but for real, stop cutting your video 6 times in 2 seconds. It's really hard to focus, it seems that the video and audio are lagging.

I know you’re Mr. React, but got any thoughts on Vue and Nativescript and how it compares to React Native?

I mean Airbnb dropped react-native, Shopify went all in with react-native. Many others are using react-native and many aren't. People use one side of the story and push it as the only story that exists, but probably for every company that dropped react-native, there are 10 companies that are happily using it.

I defently think that the 20% are properly people that had the hard tasks like optimizing or doing things you probley shouldn't

"airbnb engineering is not something to look up to" - Now I fully understand why Gary Borton sucked so much

Yup Tailwind is the prime example of this no one talks about its advantages or disadvantages they just say "But this article!" or "But this expert!". Im so tired of newbies creaming over the latest and greatest thing with no idea what it is they are talking about simply because they over heard some buzzword now its the best thing and should be applied every where without consideration. After the newbie gets enough experience to see the disadvantages they will ignore the context and claim that the whole thing was bad all along. Once the cycle completes its time to pick the next buzzword and then demand it everywhere with no regard for context, if anyone asks why we reasoned our buzzword the best we point to articles, experts and finally explain "I can't explain why its the best you just have to trust me bro". Engineering that isn't reasoned, doesn't consider context, not based on data and can't be explained by the engineer is not engineering its blind faith. We need to bring back engineering and humiliate the blind faith engineers out of the industry.

Svelte Native is also production ready... What React Native can do, Svelte can do it better and faster.

Wasn't this streamed months ago?

The problem with react native is that its DX is horrible and it does not deliver on its reusability promises. Just setting the thing up could be a whole afternoon (and good luck using it if you have spaces/special characters in your Windows username, I was debugging that for a friend for like 3 days). Expo was supposed to solve that, and it did, however nowadays, you cannot even build the thing without being locked to their cloud solution (where you don't even own your signing keys) and installing a billion packages. I simply cannot use it under these conditions :(. You can emerge expo, but good luck compiling that :). Also, if you use Expo and decide to develop in a browser, be aware that the app might not compile for mobile, because you used pixels or any other web-native units/css properties (Had to rewrite an entire codebase that ran in the browser, but wouldn't run on mobile, fun to find out few days before a deadline). If you decide to write pure react native using a virtualized mobile phone, enjoy reaaaly long hot-reload times, if you're lucky, since hot-reload does not work 90% of the time. The whole dev setup takes a lot of RAM, and people with low-end devices simply cannot even start it. Oh, and "reusability" of components is basically a lie. I have never been able to reuse something from my web codebase inside my mobile codebase, except for type definitions, utility functions, and typescript-related stuff (which helped ngl, gotta admit that). Not only are the elements entirely different, but styling is as well. Tell me about the last time you had something in your web app and needed it in your mobile app. Mobile apps are fundamentally different from web apps (UI and UX wise). Tell me Theo, have you ever used react native for a project? Try it out and see how you like it. Unfortunately, there aren't any other viable alternatives (I cannot even look at Flutter code, it's just a nested OOP-filled mess, basically Java in disguise), so I'll probably stick to it for now, but once something better pops up, I'm jumping the ship soooo fast. The issue is that native cross-platform development is very hard/complex problem in general. Do you know how developers solved it on Desktop? After 30 years, we decide that it would be just easier to ship a whole browser nowadays (electron) :), because there have been countless failed attempts to "get it right", and we may never will. Tauri mobile seems interesting, however since it uses native webviews, I fear that my app will be broken in 10 different ways on 10 different devices just because mobile browsers are terrible when it comes to standards (looking at you Safari).