Ehh, kotlin MPP isn't far enough along for me yet. I'm biased against JS-based approaches. Xamarin is the best current option in my (very biased) opinion
EDIT: but kotlin MPP is my long term hope. Once they iron out the kinks (e.g. ios coroutines)
I was skeptical of React native especially having tried it a few years ago, but new versions are incredibly nice.
Plus, it’s running JS off thread. Performance has been fantastic. I rewrote recently an app in SwiftUI - the React Native app was faster and easier to write. Which was a surprise to me because I like the SwiftUI components more, but in the end the far superior hot reloading and far better dev tools, along with the much better flexibility (less time “getting the code/types to run”) meant I was moving about 5-10x faster.
Finally, we are sharing almost 100% of code across native and web. We built a component kit designed to use react-native-web and that handles just a few edge cases, and the net result is quite awesome. We do obviously have it designed to look different when mobile, but it’s the exact same as the web responsive mobile. The web version adapts nicely based on screen size as well.
So unlike Flutter you’re not having to deliver a massive web bundle with tons of incompatibilities and perf issues. And unlike any other language you’re fully cross platform.
I ran it for the first time the other day on Android just to test if it worked and it did first try, no code change necessary. I’ve definitely changed my opinion - React is not just viable, but preferred to me, even if I could theoretically move as fast with a native app in each language.
Yeah my one time getting into react native was not good. Ran into several show stopping bugs with the build tooling basically immediately. Hot reload is absolutely a killer feature though and I wish I could have stuck with it for that alone.
My issue with JS isn't the fact that its on/off the main thread, its that it is _necessarily async_ due to the bridge. That is _really_ limiting to design around.
Thats why Xamarin is in many ways the best of both worlds for mobile dev. If WASM/client-side-blazor take off then it can also target web.
Are you doing the heavy lifting on the native side? I haven't used react native for a while so I don't know the facilities it offers, but my understanding was navigation/animation were not really solved yet. I would also be curious about what devices you are validating the interactions on. Is it a wide range, or mostly newer models?
For async issues, the canonical example I can think of is state restoration for when an app/activity is reaped by the system. These are synchronous platform APIs and so your options are very limited on how you plan to support them. Another example would be doing any sort of IO/background processing in the JS context that happens to return during interaction/animation that is also in the JS context.
Ah yea I haven't run into the state restoration thing. Fabric[0] is fairly exciting though, and seems like it will have a sync API.
I think they've improved quite a bit on animations, the Animated library has worked well for me with PanResponder, I was able to get a pretty complex bottom drawer interaction working (much like Apple Maps) where you need to handle bubbling events with multiple nested scrollable areas and dragging that inits only when scrolled to top, etc, all came together very smoothly. In SwiftUI it was a similar API, but far more work to get to behave and in the end I was doing some hacky stuff to get it finally fully behaving. Granted, SwiftUI is early stage, so perhaps in a year or so it will also have figured all this out.
As for testing, we've tested on a $100 two year old Android device with success, but nothing truly old.
EDIT: but kotlin MPP is my long term hope. Once they iron out the kinks (e.g. ios coroutines)