Why I moved to React Native

since I've been doing more react native videos people have asked me why I use react native or even why did Simon switch to react native I hate Simon should I also switch to react native a lot of questions came up and I never gave an detailed answer nor did I want to have like a reaction video to these comments and sometimes even these hateful comments I wanted to do this video not as a justification but actually an explanation of why I use react native and this video will basically have three parts first of all why I did not use react native second part why I decided to to use react native and third part why you should maybe use it too also keep watching until the end to hear my honest opinion about the whole react native versus flat Wars capaces thing and I will also answer some common questions that I've seen from you let's start by why I did not use react native in the past in 2014 I decided to start a block and I started to use ionic back then with Cordova I created videos around it and people like that actually I also created some re native videos when it was released but I didn't really see traction back then so I decided to stick with ionic that also meant that I was deeply embedded in the angular Community as ionic was at that time tied completely to Angela and in 2018 I opened the ionic Academy which was then my main business so the ionic Academy was my income I did quit my job in 2018 to go full-time on content and the ionic Academy was my main business what's the result out of this well if the ionic and ionic is my main business I have exactly zero reasons to talk about anything related to react react native flutter or anything beyond that so learning react native was totally not on my list at that time as I was completely focused on ionic that slightly changed as ionic opened up to view and react and I gave react a try but still the core of all of this was ionic angular and on top of that beyond the content capacit and ionic always worked fine for me for all the company projects that I did the companies were totally happy with the stack of ionic capacit or ionic cover at that point so I didn't even brought up the question of why should I switch to react native so how come Simon suddenly uses react native fast forward a few years ionic is taken over by out systems which was not a bad thing ionic kept staying the same they worked independent the whole team stayed basically with them and they kept developing all the features besides all of that after the pandemic I noticed that I couldn't grow the ionic Academy anymore I just couldn't find more people to keep up against the turn so basically not more people were coming in then leaving every month so it basically was on the same level the whole time that's when I decided with a podcast with Simon to start a new project beyond that and that's when the planes for Galaxies came up so galaxies was planned as a platform with for courses from different creators about all things web swell solid view next I wanted to cover everything with galaxies and it was long in the planning and it was only released actually in March 2023 Yeah March this year was when Galaxy was first released the the problem was I couldn't make the idea of galaxies work with the focus on everything web so I had to scope down on one technology I could probably pick flutter but coming from ionic from angula from rep to mobile react native was actually the closest bad for me and I noticed that the react native company is a magnitude bigger than the ionic capacitor Community simply because react is a lot bigger and there were more people coming from react flowing to react native beyond that I was always curious about why react native gets all the hype I used it in 2015 or 2016 but didn't really touch it until this year and then I wanted to finally give it a try again and the result is all the content you've been seeing lately over the last month on this channel so it was initially more a financial or a business-wise decision but then it actually became something that I really enjoyed I enjoyed using Expo I enjoyed using react native I enjoyed talking to people from the react native community and I saw that that Community felt really good and although I don't have the experience of a lot of react developers or react native developers I already felt welcome in the community and I really fell in love with the technology and how the apps that you can build with react native look and feel so this is the real reason why I decided to use react native in the first place it was more a strategic decision in the beginning but then became something bigger and that brings me to why you should maybe also consider using react native so of course the usual crossplatform stuff you can have like one team smaller team you don't need an iOS and an Android team like all of that is true basically for react native for flutter for Ionic and everything else that's doing crossplatform right you can move faster into the native platforms but beyond that react native actually has some advantages compared to other Technologies I've recently seen a video from Theo I talked to Fernando Rojo and all of them agree that the abstraction layer in these crossplatform Frameworks really matters so if you talk about capacitor the abstraction layer is pretty high you have basically your web application and it's wrapped in a web view yes of course with the bridge you can talk to Native pluging but beyond that it's still a web app if we talk about flutter well we can see that pretty much everything you do is just custom drawn on the screen so they have their own Sky rendering engine and it's just all custom although it looks kind of native it is really just all custom stuff and you can ship over the a updates with flutter everything is bundled in the app while with react native you actually have an abstraction layer that's at a pretty good spot so we still got native controls we got native scroll views and Views and buttons with react native and they communicate with with JavaScript and we also can replace that JavaScript bundle over the air to have these hot code pushes or whatever you want to call them and yes I'm aware that we can also do this with capacitor but beyond that react native just renders to these Naes components and it just feels a bit more native to some degree we all have to admit that besides that there are a few more things so the whole Expo framework is great Expo is more like a HUD of tools you can check out a video on my channel Expo World react native CLI Expo makes it just unbelievable easy for beginners to get into react native and I highly recommend it for everyone getting started also react native is moving closer to the web with Frameworks like solito or with react native web and the Expo router and all the things you see they're trying to kind of unify what we already have seen with capacitors you can drop capacitor into a web project and you share 100% of the code that's always been an argument against react native as your react native code has like view text touchable opacity and things that you don't have in the traditional Dom and the web elements but these Frameworks try to unify that and I've seen results where we can really have a great native IOS and Android app with a react native look and feel and then even a great website based on probably something like nextjs and in combination with solito beyond the technical reasons there are of course also the numbers so react kept winning over the last years maybe angula is making a comeback this year who knows but just in terms of numbers there are a lot more react developers and these developers will usually naturally flow into react native and it's just growing the market more companies want to build react native applications so they're going to be more react native jobs and more people learning react native so the whole circle just keeps continuing because react has evolved in this huge ecosystem and based on this huge ecosystem you also of course get the benefit of a lot of support answers to questions and also great Community packages all right so all of these are some vake reasons why I decid to use react native and why you should maybe consider using it as well let's do a quick question round of some common questions that I get now as well would I recommend that you give react native an expo a try 100% yes even if it's just for seeing how the grass on the other side looks it is phenomenal and you should do the same by the way with flutter just see how other Frameworks or other Solutions solve problems and maybe you're going to see that I really like that approach or you're going to see uh I totally don't like that approach do you have to switch from technology X to react native no absolutely not only if you have a real reason to switch and the real reason means your customer said your app is slow they said it looks bad you can't manage the the code you're using Dart and you don't like it I mean that's from flut switching somewhere else but you get it only switch to react native please if you have a real reason and Simon is doing react native is not a good reason to move your project from whatever you're using just did react native is react with ionic better than angular up with ionic I got that question all the time because maybe people see okay react native maybe I can like take the middle ground of still using ionic and then using react well that doesn't really make a difference use react use view or use angular with ionic and Capac to just build a good performance application the result will basically be the same there's not a real difference in react view or angular even JavaScript with react uh with angular and with ionic and capacitor that's it too many Frameworks okay this might be a spicy one is react native better than flutter or capacitor you're going to find a lot of questions usually by the way capacitor is not even discussed on on social media or anyway it's usually react native where this flutter so is react native better and the answer is yes to some degree react native is better because of the reasons I said before over the a updates the abstraction layer rendering to the actual native components of the platform there are a lot of reasons that really speak for react native follow-up question is react native the overall best selection well that's hard to say if you don't give me any more information to that question I would probably answer yes for standard consumer facing applications react native is probably the best technology you can use right now that being said there are so many other scenarios you're building an in-house tool your whole company is using angula uh you really want to have only one codebase because you're just one developer there are so many other factors that you need to calculate in that could uh change my perspective on this question so overall as I said in general without other information yes react native is probably the best but for specific scenarios there are other tools probably better for example developing a game use Unity uh you really want a lot of native functionality then just build an iOS and a native Android application so so check the tool that works best for you all right so this video actually became longer than I expected but I really wanted to drive this point home so why did I switch to react native it was initially a strategic or financial decision but then became something I now deeply care about just like I have grown into the ioni community 8 years ago I start to grow into and with the react native community and I feel like there's a lot more that we can explore with react native you're going to see a few good creators here on YouTube but still react native is feeling like it's early days people discuss should I use it should I use it not and there are so many great apps built with react native yet to some degree you don't find great answers to things going on in react native and on top of that a lot of things are changing expo from 2 years ago is not how Expo is today react native from two or 3 years ago is not how react native is today so it's ever evolving and I think there's a lot of potential in react native so even if you're just curious about it give it a try and see how you like it and if you not want to get your feet wet just go to galaxies. Dev we have a quick start course that you can start for free that will show you in five or six lessons the basic steps with react native with Expo and how it works and after that you can decide if you also want to become a member of galaxies. Def which is now my course platform 100% focused on the react native ecosystem before the video ends one final note about ionic will Simon continue to do ionic yes because I still like ionic I run the ionic Academy and I like to create content around ionic so using ionic is perfectly fine and I hope you understood this after watching this video let me know in the comments if you got any other questions about why I switch to react native or anything else related to react native versus X I'm happy to answer this I'm happy to clarify this and I hope this video helped you to make your choice please make an educated Choice based on a lot of factors in your life and in your company thanks for watching make sure you like And subscribe and I will catch you in the next one so until then Happy coding Simon

Channel: Simon Grimm

Views: 39,782

Keywords: react native, why react native is better than flutter, react native expo

Id: q5aHNr4jsHM

Length: 12min 5sec (725 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 28 2023