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Ask HN: Who's tired of upgrading React Native?

by jconley on 4/28/22, 5:32 PM with 17 comments

• by steve_adams_86 on 4/28/22, 9:24 PM

  The last time I worked on a react native project my team and I wondered all the time if we were doing something seriously wrong or not.

  It seemed like very popular and commonly used dependencies had poor community support. Upgrades were often painful. Breakage during routine package upgrades occurred far more than in our non-RN typescript projects.

  We did a lot of research and asked around but it seemed to be par for the course.

  Overall I’d guess that we still saved time over learning and developing with native solutions for iOS and android, but it left me feeling like the ecosystem could be so much more productive still.

  I’ll admit I recognized the need to contribute to libraries I saw were lacking support, but the project wasn’t my main focus and I don’t think my employer cared much. In the future I should definitely complain less and help more.

• by March_f6 on 4/28/22, 6:46 PM

  100%. No particular horror stories just tons of time lost and frustrating dependency issues. Studying Swift now to go native.

• by jrvarela56 on 4/28/22, 7:07 PM

  Not at all. I use Expo tho :P https://expo.dev/

• by skydhash on 4/28/22, 8:15 PM

  I had to do this recently. I just create a new project, and move the deps and js code files in it. And then fix whatever is breaking. The great thing is that they didn't have a lot of stuff done native side. The biggest changes was updating react-navigation to 5 from 3

• by handsome_latino on 4/29/22, 2:26 AM

  I second many users here as to the caveats of React Native. I check and try new projects from time to time, and support does get a bit better especially with Expo.

  For me (as a Software Engineer focused on UX) it was how 'unnatural' apps created looked on either iOS or Android without having to do a lot of tweaking or work. I'm unfortunately not a big fan of Java (personal reasons but mostly coding style preference), so still have a bit of faith on React Native (React being one of my faves and most used frameworks).

• by atonse on 4/28/22, 11:26 PM

  What’s the solution here?

  seems like something more centralized like deno which has a big set of standard libs with stability guarantees?

  Cuz I have avoided upgrading nativebase for 3 years now.

  Our react native codebase is pretty small but still a pain to build.

• by serd on 4/29/22, 3:21 PM

  I upgraded from 0.64.2 to 0.67.4 recently. It was much easier than I expected. Looking at the logs, I had to use "react-native-clean-project" for some reason.

• by swah on 4/29/22, 9:41 AM

  Yes - I try to... not upgrade when possible.