Developers Pain Points using React Native

“ There is quite a large number of little bugs appearing in the technology which creates the need of React Native being constantly updated. And each new version has its own problems, and since the builds are not properly assembled, the old libraries fall off. ”

“ The React Native itself is often updated, but the packages for it are not. Therefore, when a developer is in a hurry to install the updates, the problems with the libraries arise . Since there is a strong dependency on packages, as a developer you need to constantly monitor if the libraries are updated. ”

“React Native is known to have cross-platform components. Android and ios platforms have their own components that are wrapped in a react-like process. As a result, we get component nesting in a hierarchy from 5-15 View elements, which form a bridge to native platforms. This is causing a lot of trouble on the performance side.”

“Disadvantages: the big size of the final bundle and uploading speed (if comparing with Flutter, for example, and we are not even competing with native apps).”

“[…]there are problems with optimization, under heavy loads or with complex animations.”

“Poorly integrated with C++. There is a bridge to C++ with JS in the official documentation, but it has been at the development stage for a very long time and everything that is there is simply impossible to adapt to your needs. As you know, encryption, graph processing, and so on are done in C++. Therefore, in order to address RN in C++, we go through a huge stack of calls. From the android side: JS⇒ Java⇒ Jni⇒ C++. From the ios side: JS⇒ obj-c⇒ C++.[…], because of problems with the transfer of images, in most cases it makes no sense for us to work with C++ in this direction. I should mention about games, performance is very important for games and React Native will not give us this. ”

“An Animated package comes out of the box. Animations are executed on a JS thread and will run with a delay if the call queue is busy. There is a solution to the problem: the package React-native-reanimated. The animations described by this library are executed on the UI thread, providing fast response, but are quite difficult to learn, especially for beginners. ”

“Tasks from the category of intelligent scanning of images using a camera are very difficult to implement, and sometimes simply impossible. Yes, there are solutions that allow you to scan QR-code and bank card numbers, but sometimes it just isn't enough. ”

“Terrible error logging. In a huge project, that involves hundreds of files, an error may appear in an unknown location, and there is no way to know where. It takes a long time to find it. Therefore, a developer, when taking on someone else's project, can very often suffer because of this. ”