I don't *want* to use React Native

do you think i just like making second-rate apps that i enjoy massive abstractions and that's why i use react native because you're wrong i use react native because facebook made it and i love facebook as a company and its mission statement to connect people together they're making the world a better place which inspires me to use react craft ql and not least of all react native when i grow up i want to be a computer just like mr zuck there's a lot of people that don't see eye to eye with me and think react native is complete crap and they're always telling me the best way to build a native app is with swift and kotlin which in my head i'm always just like oh my bad i didn't even realize that was an option spending the next six months creating an ios app in swift and then spend the next four months re-implementing it in kotlin for android but now that you say it that sounds like a great time the thing is they're absolutely correct and that when you write an app in kotlin or swift it's usually going to lead to a better app in regards to performance and just all of the things and i say usually here because there are some developers out there that you know they'll write you an app and assembly and it just comes out slower than a python interpreter anyway here's where i have a problem with this in the year 2020 the worst you're in existence i find it absolutely ridiculous that if i want to render the same text on this screen as i do on this screen that i have to learn two totally different programming languages two totally different app frameworks and have two totally different code bases the fact that this is the default way to build apps just blows my mind how do we not have a better standard at this point and i get it android is totally different than ios but the first thing that we learn as junior developers is dry don't repeat yourself yet here we are to be fair one of the first lessons you learn as a senior developer is a leaky abstraction is worse than just repeating yourself twice so there is that too but come on i just want to render some text on two black rectangles like you know plus don't forget as soon as the user presses the chrome or the safari app and then they go on to your website you're gonna need a totally different code base for that as well then don't make an app i only use mobile websites just make a mobile website i hear developers say this all the freaking time especially on hacker news they're just like oh i don't download apps i didn't download the facebook app i just use the mobile website it's great you should just make them a website and they love pwas and that's great if your audience is developers but the problem is the rest of the freaking world is just addicted to apps my grandma doesn't want to visit your mobile website she wants to download your app and in this day and age if your business does not have a website an ios app and an android app people just don't take you seriously i don't like it i wish i could just build a website and be done with my life but it's the way things are life sucks so when someone says just make a native app with kotlin and swift it's wonderful i'm just like bro how come you're not eat homemade pasta every night huh huh you don't want to hire personal chef no don't can't afford it don't i put the time and energy in yourself to make it didn't freaking think so you do know that it yields better results with superior taste and texture to that box of mom's spaghetti you're fixing to boil over there react native is a box of rigatoni or if you're gluten free it's a stick of celery and i would love if homemade pasta just magically appeared in front of me i don't want to eat react native but you know what the reason why you and me are over here boiling a box of pasta is because it is convenient and good enough now some of you are probably wondering why i'm eating this brand instead of say flutter which depending on who you talk to will tell you it tastes way better but for me i've actually kind of lost interest in flutter and the main reason for that is it doesn't really have the same level of support for sharing code between an app and a website react native uses javascript websites use javascript and so it's easy to share javascript between the two to give you an idea of what code you might share between the two here's some of the stuff that i share so constants validation logic random utility functions business logic data fetching npm libraries and if you're using a react on your website you can share react stuff in both places so i'll share stuff like custom hooks and any like state management stuff and that's what i'm sharing between the website and the app for my cooking project and it saved me a bunch of time and effort not having to redo everything and just the maintenance cost plus if you want to go even further and share ui code react native web is an option where you can write your react native code and then use that for a website as well and that's exactly what twitter is using right now for its website though funny enough i've actually never heard them talk about using react native for their app so that is a little bit sus if you ask me compare this with flutter which uses the dart programming language and you just can't really share code between that and the website and javascript now there is flutter for web that is in beta that lets you use flutter and dart to build a website and if say in six months that actually becomes really legit and you can make really good websites better than you know with react then for sure i will definitely reconsider flutter but until then uh yeah i'm just kinda not that interested in it there are two other players that i've seen in this like cross-platform javascript space namely ionic and nativescript which i haven't tried and don't really know anything about them except that they offer like other front end frameworks so like you can build an app and view or if it tickles your fancy in angular as well but i don't know if they're any good i've only focused on react native since that is the dominant player now if you can afford an ios and android team go for it you should build the best possible app but here's the thing i actually don't know if it's so clear-cut even if you have the money for it that you should go with kotlin and swift the reason i say that is these companies are literally swimming in money they have ios and android teams and they are still choosing to adopt react native for some of their apps react native doesn't make the best apps just like how electron doesn't make the best desktop apps yet more and more companies are choosing both because it's good enough and the development gains of having one code base or at least close to one code base make up for it you

Channel: Ben Awad

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Id: E5xThvyaGbE

Length: 6min 31sec (391 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 23 2020