Anyone here have experience with both Native and React Native?
I've used Ionic before for a prototype and it was very sluggish on a simple business application. Considering whether we should rewrite it in Native or React Native for our production version.
What would you say are the pros and cons of choosing one over the other?
We'll be making use of maps, gps, signatures, qr scanning, offline storage, photo capturing and will probably need to support both Android and iOS.
Samuil Yanovski
I'm mostly a native developer, but recently had to do a little plugin development for React Native.
To be fair, I was quite disappointed with the experience I had with RN. It took me an unreasonable amount of time to figure things out - from running an existing project to wiring up a native UI component. The main issue I had was lack of easily available documentation and samples. RN also uses its own ui manager - meaning some existing UI libraries might be broken (e.g. JWPlayer's fullscreen doesn't work, because it relies on the native layout params in order to maximize/ minimize the player). That said, writing an application, once all the plugins are available seems to be a lot easier - at least the docs seem to be a lot better for this use case.
I'm not quite happy with RN -there are issues with it. But at the same time I can't deny the fact that it would allow you to reuse a lot of code. Besides you already have experience with JavaScript (not sure how good are you at Java, Kotlin, Objective-C and Swift).
Generally I would go like this: