Glad they spent some times discussing the downsides. I’m 4 months in to a Hotwire Native replacement for an unmaintained React Native app. The differences are stark and I could definitely see myself picking up Hotwire again for another project if given the same constraints, but I’ve had good experiences with React Native in the past too. Ultimately though I just do not like all the work that has to go into maintaining a large scale React codebase.
Curious what you meant by the last sentence there. Does React uniquely complicate maintenance as a codebase grows?
We maintain a few number of projects for clients - the apps are feature complete and will not change much in the next years. The goal here is to spend not much money on the apps but to keep them functional in the appstore.
RN is somewhat cheaper up fron than native development or say flutter. Unfortunately, maintenance cost is high and difficult to predict.
Why?
Appstores are adding new requirements and increase API-level all the time. Support for that is often baked into new RN versions. Unfortunately, new RN versions often break things, which break libraries in turn. So you need to upgrade this morass and if you are unlucky, you need to redevelop huge swaths of your app because the lib now is deprecated /works differently / will never be updated to the new RN version.