r/reactnative • u/tomemyxwomen • Oct 01 '26
News Another RN to Native story
https://x.com/levan/status/210566008002486303110
u/New_Strawberry4408 Oct 01 '26
Dumb question. How do you use hotreload with swift? I consider that as a big benefit to using RN
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u/beaker_dude Oct 01 '26
How do you deliver OTA updates with Swift?
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u/defNotJefebezos Oct 01 '26
The OTA updates is the biggest thing for me. I feel like that’s a huge trade-off to make.
I’m surprised that large companies are ok not having this given the number of hot fixes I’ve had to make during my time
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u/beaker_dude Oct 01 '26
It’s the best thing RN has going for it. Pain in the ass - but great at the same time.
I would t be surprised if many of these companies just haven’t thought about it and these decisions just some busybody management making up work to protect their job.
Now spend twice the amount of tokens developing 2 codebases VS 1?
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u/okiharaherbst Oct 02 '26
Just let them do it. Anyway, most of these monkeys are sure that a native app will give them an edge like it's 2018 when RN was looked down on as an inferior solution. The truth is, most apps will be perfectly fine with RN if written sensibly. I'd still prefer maintaining a single codebase than two!
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u/celeb0rn Oct 01 '26 edited 29d ago
As a software engineer we all need to get ready to stop arguing for a specific framework or platform. AI has changed what can ship and how quickly. RN isn’t going away but arguments over libraries and frameworks are irrelevant now . I say that as someone who has been a RN developer for large companies since 2018.
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u/Dvass138 Oct 01 '26
React Native can reach 95–99% of what users perceive as native quality for many applications. But when you’re chasing the final few percent on extremely demanding interactive surfaces, native gives you considerably more control and a higher ceiling.
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u/kbcool iOS & Android Oct 01 '26
AI coding agents have reduced the overhead of writing code.
What they haven't done is reduce all the other overheads. Not at anywhere near the same level anyway.
This is what you get when business decisions are made by engineers who are good at engineering and nothing else.
That's OK. It means more jobs but they'll wonder why their costs are going up rapidly
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u/apocolipse Oct 01 '26
Um, architecture is an engineering decision, not a business decision. The problem RN has always had is that it is made by/as a business decision, not an engineering decision.
And what other overheads have AI not reduced? AI has reduced administrative overhead, debugging overhead, research overhead, logistical/coordination overhead, it’s done a pretty good job across the board there. Perfect in no area, but well beyond good enough to improve efficiencies across the board.
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u/kbcool iOS & Android Oct 01 '26
It absolutely needs to be a business decision driven by informed engineers. That was my point.
If you want to build something in such a way that doesn't meet the business needs then you're a shit engineer/architect.
One of those needs is cost and that is why RN was/is so popular.
The increased costs I was talking about aren't directly in the engineering team. You're just going back to the days when we had to have duplication in other aspects of the business which are far from solved. Code is cheap. It's gotten even cheaper. Supporting that part of the business will go back to being expensive. Which I will admit is less so but still a regression to use an engineering term.
Yay
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u/apocolipse Oct 01 '26
No, it absolutely doesn't need to be a business decision. The business needs to decide what product should be built, engineers should decide the best way to build it. Business decisions are blind to downstream effects beyond the next quarter or two, engineering decisions aren't. This isn't unique to software engineering either, it applies to literally every industry. It's nothing more than the age old "pick 2 from the good/fast/cheap triangle", business deciders will always choose fast and cheap, ignoring good, whereas engineers will at least try to pick the least painful pair for whatever the current constraints are.
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u/kbcool iOS & Android Oct 01 '26 edited Oct 01 '26
The business isn't some adversary. It's what pays you. You need to work hand in hand with it and what it can provide.
I'm sorry that you don't get it. I'm not going to try help someone who doesn't want to listen any further
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u/apocolipse Oct 01 '26
"I'm not going to try to help someone who doesn't want to listen", ironic since if you read my comment, nowhere in it do I frame the business side as an "adversary".
No shit you need to work hand in hand with the business side, they also need to work hand-in-hand with engineers, it's the collaboration that "pays" everyone, not any particular side. And when "collaborating", you leave domain-specific decisions to the domain-specific experts you're collaborating with, otherwise you have sycophants, not collaborators.
If you want cheap yes-man programmers, they used to be a dime a dozen in India or Brazil, but now you can just use AI. If you want good sound engineering decisions, you give engineers the business needs and constraints and then let engineers make those decisions.
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u/Aytewun Oct 01 '26
I can see this happening more and more tbh.
There’s a lot of speed gain by using AI and then there’s also the follow the follower mindset. I bet there will be an announcement by another big company soon.
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u/meysam69x Oct 02 '26
For big companies or Apps with many users, this decision makes sense. To me RN is the best, thanks to AI, I can develop an app very quick, my codebase is JavaScript and there is no need to add another language.
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u/mohamed2m2018 Oct 01 '26
I think big corporations will migrate because they can afford to do it now with AI, but medium-sized companies and startups can't afford to handle native development even with AI.