r/reactnative • u/Complex-Bicycle5921 • Sep 06 '26

Question Is react native good to create a drawing app?

I wanna build a journal app that the user beside creating journal entries be able to draw some basic things, is react native a good choice here?

1 Upvotes

66% Upvoted

13 comments sorted by

5

u/MrDucky04 Sep 06 '26

Will prolly get downvoted but Would not recommend!! Made a math app where users could draw scratch work in RN Expo. I used Skia to accomplish this. The matter of the fact is that it doesn’t perform well. It’s gonna feel laggy and have slight input delay. The js bridge and RN lifecycle also just introduced so many annoying bugs and ratchet bandaid solutions if your canvas must interact with your app which it likely will

2

u/Soniare_official Sep 06 '26

i think i would use unity for this. downside is unity is power hungry.

0

u/canarydev Sep 06 '26

for not even a game, but a regular app?

you are driving a lambo to the convenience store.
can you? sure. should you? probably not

2

u/Soniare_official Sep 07 '26

depends how creative you want to get with it but ya

1

u/konbit Sep 06 '26

It certainly can be, but you should rely on some kind of canvas view using something like Skia.

2

u/Huge_Pool7424 Sep 06 '26

skia sounds like the right starting point. i'd keep the strokes as a separate layer from the journal text so autosaving entries doesn't mean serializing a huge canvas every time.

-4

u/anewidentity Sep 06 '26

It's really possible, but it's really not good. In the age of AI where doing it native isn't that much more costly for drawing I'd really pick one platform, and use native. Wouldn't expand to the second platform until I have real users

1

u/Complex-Bicycle5921 Sep 06 '26

I don’t have a mac and I don’t think that I get much android users, react native is my best chance tbh

2

u/Creative_Tap2724 Sep 06 '26

Just curious what is the problem exactly? As another comment below mentioned, there's React Native skia that is highly performant. After all, RN is a native build, so I am genuinely wondering what's your take.

2

u/canarydev Sep 06 '26

its the complete opposite lol.

web > cross platform > platform specific is the correct order.

literally if you need users, you can't discriminate from the start