Conclusions of a React Native hackalong, abridged

I was recently asked to hold a React Native hackalong with the not so secret agenda of finding out if React Native was a good alternative for quickly prototyping native applications, if it was viable for production applications, and how fast a web/React developer could get up to speed with it.

There were ~25 test subjects, mostly web developers. Some who had never worked with React, and some who had done some native development. They were to be tested by having everyone building their own basic chat application that talked to a websocket server and send packages to each other. This would demonstrate how to provide input, save it as state, render views inside of a listview and use the network APIs, the extra assignments were, trying to save everything to localstorage, styling it, and create some animations.

The pros:

• Very fast to scaffold a basic app once you got the environment installed (very easy for iOS some work for Android).
• Hot/live reload is so much better than the normal build and restart approach of native applications.
• It was way easier for web/js developers to get up and running than them learning native, even for those that had never seen React.
• Using any IDE is nice.
• Most of the NPM packages work directly, as long as they don’t have a dependency on the DOM.
• You can keep most, if not all of the business logic from your existing React apps.
• Flexbox and mostly css styling felt familiar.

The cons:

• You kind of want to write HTML instead of using React Native views, at least in the beginning.
• You cannot reuse your existing React application views, but it could be possible to search and replace lots of stuff.
• Some differences between the styling and normal CSS that you have to find, animation for instance.
• Some documentation (localstorage) had not kept up with the React Native teams development.

Conclusions: We found that React Native would be very well suited for prototyping applications. The easiest way to do this for web devs otherwise would be to use hybrid apps or “native feel” web frameworks. That doesn’t really give the same look and feel as a truly native application. Other options could be Xamarin for .NET developers or Nativescript which has the same basic idea as React Native. We also figure that React Native is production ready, not that we got that far in our own experiments but from what we’ve read and by looking at how feature complete it is.