The State of JavaScript 2018 is impressive and talked about alot, let’s dive deep into what people have to say about React Native this year.
The State of JavaScript 2018 survey was release recently and if you have not seen it yet, you can check it out from the link below:
In this post, let’s walkthrough what the survey results are for React Native and what users like and dislike most about React Native.
Most Liked Aspects of React Native
Rich Ecosystem
The Most liked feature of React Native is the Rich Package Ecosystem. I have always enjoyed working with React Native’s ecosystem and it doesn’t surprise me that people enjoyed that the most as well.
With starter kits like expo and ignite, setting up a React Native application and getting started on a project is very simple and intuitive. There are also lots of native components that come out of the box making the experience smooth.
Programming style and patterns
The vote for elegant programming style and patterns comes from the use of JavaScript and React. React is one of the most popular and widely used web frameworks and using React to build mobile applications is definitely appealing to users. Moreover, JavaScript developers can get on the mobile development bandwagon with easy when using React Native. This is a huge perk for React Native.
Facebook and good documentation
The third most liked factor is that it is backed by a corporate like Facebook. This has helped people trust the framework and use it in their products. Over the years, the documentation on React Native has also got so much better. React Native has an official blog where they write about the latest trends and future plans for the framework. The survey shows that users are quite happy about React Native documentation. This is a crucial aspect for adoption of a framework.
Powerful Tooling
After using React Native for over two years now, I cannot agree with this more. React Native provides an awesome developer experience with the powerful tooling it supports. Hot Reloading has saved me so many hours of developer time. With the React Native Debugger, debugging and testing React Native code is so much easier compared to other frameworks. It looks like users of React Native really like the tooling that it offers.
Most Disliked Aspects of React Native
Now, let’s look into what people really dislike about React Native.
Errors
With support to cross-platform capabilities, React Native users have to deal with errors and bugs that are unrelated to their code. Typically users are thrown off when they see errors that they cannot understand or do anything about. React Native users have a complain and that is about how they dislike the error-prone code. I wouldn’t really call it error-prone code, but I see these as compatibility issues.
Some of these errors could arise with xcode issues, errors on different versions of xcode, android studio, mac OS and so on. Most of the errors I have seen are not on the code level, but mostly related to compatibility with the several ecosystems that are needed. But the React Native team has promised monthly releases and those should ease some of these pain points for us quickly.
Poor Performance
This was a shocker for me, because I have not seen significant performance issues with React Native. Obviously React Native cannot be used to develop a fully animated gaming app, but it performs significantly better than some other frameworks around. Maybe this came from users who are using animations heavily, which React Native is not great with. Nevertheless, this is one of the top complaints of React Native and I hope the re-architecture that is planned for React Native in the future releases can help with this as well.
Fast Changing
Upgrade time with React Native is not always fun, and is also one of my big complain. Things used to be bad a year ago, and I think it is much better now. The last few upgrades have actually been quite smooth for me. With a young framework like React Native, the pace is fast and hard to catch up with sometimes. But that will be its nature for at least few years till it is considered a mature framework.
Hot and Trending
Overall, React Native is hot and has been adopted widely along with another mobile framework “Electron”. Although there are some pain points, people still like it and are using it widely. Hopefully we can keep the momentum, and make React Native better in the upcoming months and years.