What do you dislike about React Native?
I will probably be heavily downvoted but here goes nothing. I have not used React Native yet, but I followed and was heavily invested in the &quot;write once deploy anywhere&quot; trend between 2009 - 2014.<p>From phonegap (before it became cordova), to Adobe Air with it&#x27;s bad performance and &quot;native extensions&quot;, to Appcelerator Titanium that put a nodejs server in your phone and even had Windows Phone 7 support, to cordova, to Haxe, to sencha and others.
Appcelerator Titanium was the only ones that did real native for some cases like scrollviews, Haxe used custom C++ apis, the rest used webviews, and adobe air was basically flash emulated that ran like shit.<p>Write once deploy anywhere, meant write once, deploy somewhat anywhere, spend double the time to make that promise true. Kinda like having to do IE6 support in the past.
I was deep in that madness up until mid-2014. At that point I decided to buy a macbook and give native development a try (obj-c for ios and java for android -- When I say native I mean real native and not React Native).<p>What a magical experience! Things that are tough to do in web even today, like real never-ending scroll lists, are a breeze in native with their reusable cells. Things like standard headers and modals, are already built in and a few lines away. And I actually prefer the touch event handlers on both ios and android to the web&#x27;s &quot;mouse&#x2F;touch&#x2F;PointerEvents&quot; ones.<p>I do not understand why web developers have such a knee jerk reaction to native development. ObjectiveC&#x2F;Swift and Java are actually easy to write. Tooling (especially for ios) is fantastic. In my experience, it is much faster to write UI interfaces in Objective C and Swift (I never use xcode&#x27;s UI builder) than html+JS. But the real joy is being able to harness the real power of your phone. I run some C++ algorithms on both ios and android (I guess C&#x2F;C++ is the original cross platform) that on android are faster than the built-in Java apis themselves! And of course, true multithreading!<p>But here we are, non-stop chasing the &quot;no! I want javascript in my frontend, and in my servers, and javascript in my ios apps and android too!&quot; dream.<p>Perhaps React Native accomplishes that. I hope it really does and solves that decade-long promise of &quot;write once deploy anywhere&quot;. I guess all what I &#x27;m trying to say is, don&#x27;t be afraid of native people! Web devs are willing to go through insane hoops and loops instead of just... giving the real thing a go. So weird.