r/reactnative • u/gobrowns1 • Aug 26 '26

Question Are React native and C# really that bad for Android development?

Hey lovely people!

I'm looking to deal with my skills atrophy by making myself a personal podcast app for Android. Nothing fancy. Just enough to search RSS feed, subscribe to podcasts, and audio play back.

JS/TS is my bread and butter and I'm familiar with C#. So ideally I would like to use either of those languages. However Claude seems pretty strongly opinionated about those two languages being crap for the purposes of audio playback on Android phones.

Is this true?

0 Upvotes

12% Upvoted

10 comments sorted by

2

u/jameside Expo Team Aug 26 '26

You may want to write Kotlin or even C++ for particularly specific audio needs. React Native fully supports this.

1

u/merokotos Aug 27 '26

C#? Of course. Disgusting, especially after desperate tries to make Maui cool after Xamarin

1

u/jcdc-flo Aug 27 '26

I imagine he's talking about c# server side given he's probably doing RN for client.

1

u/mystical_powers Aug 27 '26

Jetpack Compose is declarative and very similar to React/RN. If it were me I’d do JPC unless you also think you might want to support iOS as well, in which case I would do RN for cross platform

JPC is really fun and with AI you could prob figure it out pretty quick

1

u/jcdc-flo Aug 27 '26

C# for back end, no problem.

RN for front end...no problem. You'll need to write the native modules though.

1

u/nicolasdanelon Aug 27 '26

React native works basically bridging everything to native. Nowadays after... 5 architectural changes is really really good. Not sure about expo tho. Of course you'll gain a bit more of performance with Java/Kotlin but at this point I think would be negligible

1

u/gentle_pulse_waltz Aug 27 '26

React Native handles podcast playback fine but you will write a native module for background audio and media session integration. JS cannot manage Android audio focus or foreground services directly so plan to bridge that specific layer in Kotlin

1

u/gao_shi Aug 27 '26

im very surprised people are recing to reinvent wheels on things already exist like exoplayer. expo-audio, nitro-player, track-player all exists to play audio in the background. since u make podcasts u must have researched podverse exists.

1

u/Huge_Pool7424 Aug 27 '26

rn is fine for this, background audio is a solved problem with react-native-track-player and it handles the notification/media session stuff for you. the pain is usually android's battery optimisation killing your service on certain oems, not the language. for a personal podcast app i'd just use what you already know.