Issue #279
Original post https://medium.com/fantageek/what-is-create-react-native-app-9f3bc5a6c2a3
As someone who comes to React Native from iOS and Android background, I like React and Javascript as much as I like Swift and Kotlin. React Native is a cool concept, but things that sound good in theory may not work well in practice.
Another layer of abstraction
Up until now, I still don’t get why big companies choose React Native over native ones, as in the end what we do is to deliver good experience to the end user, not the easy development for developers. I have seen companies saying goodbye to React Native and people saying that React Native is just React philosophy learn once, write anywhere, that they choose React Native mainly for the React style, not for cross platform development. But the fact can’t be denied that people choose React Native mostly for cross platform development. Write once, deploy many places is so compelling. We still of course need to tweak a bit for each platform, but most of the code is reuse.
I have to confess that I myself spend less time developing than digging into compiling and bundling issues. Nothing comes for free. To be successful with React Native, not only we need strong understanding on both iOS and Android, but also ready to step into solving issues. We can’t just open issues, pray and wait and hope someone solves it. We can’t just use other dependencies blindly and call it a day. A trivial bug can be super hard to fix in React Native, and our projects can’t wait. Big companies have, of course, enough resource to solve issues, but for small teams, React Native is a trade off decision to consider.
A wrapper for a wrapper
Enough about that. Let’s go to official React Native getting started guide. It recommend create-react-native-app. As someone who made electron.js apps and used create-react-app, I choose create-react-native-app right away, as I think it is the equivalent in terms of creating React Native apps. I know there is react-native init and though that it must have some problems, otherwise people don’t introduce create-react-native-app.
After playing with create-react-native-app and eject, and after that read carefully through its caveats, I know it’s time to use just react-native init . In the end I just need a quick way to bootstrap React Native app with enough tooling (Babel, JSX, Hot reloading), however create-react-native-app is just a limited experience in Expo with opinionated services like Expo push notification docs.expo.io/versions/latest/guides/push-notifications.html and connectivity to Google Cloud Platform and AWS. I know every thing has its use case, but in this case it’s not the tool for me. Dependencies are the root of all evils, and React Native already has a lot, I don’t want more unnecessary things.
The concept of Expo is actually nice, in that it allows newbie to step into React Native fast with recommended tooling already set up, and the ability to reject later. It also useful in sharing Snack to help reproduce issues. But the name of the repo create-react-native-app is a bit misleading.
Maybe it’s just me, or …
No, I would never use Expo for a serious project. I imagine what ends up happening in most projects is they reach a point where they have to ultimately eject the app (e.g. needing a native module) which sounds very painful.
If you use EXPO, you use wrapper-wrapper.
Expo is a great tool for getting started quickly with React Native. However, it’s not always something that can get you to the finish line. From what I’ve seen, the Expo team is making a lot of great decisions with their product roadmap. But their rapid pace of development has often led to bugs in new features.
JS and assets managed by Expo require connectivity to Google Cloud Platform and AWS
If you are coming from web world, you need to know that create-react-native-app is not the create-react-app equivalent But if you want more control over your project, something like tweaking your react native Android and iOS project, I highly suggest you use the official react-native-cli. Still, one simple command, react-native init ProjectName, and you are good to go.
I wish I would have used “Native” from the get go, instead I wasted quite a bit of time with Expo Maybe the biggest one for me is that the whole thing feels like adding another layer of indirection and complexity to an already complicated stack I wish Expo would get removed from the react-native Getting Started guide to avoid confusing new arrivals
The Expo dev team did a lot of good stuff there, and they are all doing it for free, so I definitely want to thank all of them for providing a smoother entrance to this world. If they ever manage to solve this issue of custom native code somehow, it may become my platform of choice again.
I love everything about Expo except the size of the binaries. Each binary weighs around 25 MB regardless of your app. So the first thing I did was to migrate my existing Expo app to React Native.
If you are new to React Native and you think this is the “must” way to go. Check if it meets your needs first. If you are planning to use third party RN packages that have custom native modules. Expo does not support this functionality and in that case, you will have to eject Expo-Kit. In my opinion, if you are going to eject any kit, don’t use it in the first place. It will probably make things harder than if you hadn’t used the kit at all.