Some pain point when I using React Native

Although Airbnb was just sunsetting the usage of React Native on their mobile app. But I still choose it to develop a side project app.

As an Android developer, React Native is very attractive to me. I can construct both iOS and Android app but only maintaining the same code. React is also a cool web technology I study for a while.

 

But after some effort, I found there are some pain point to use it to develop the mobile app.

• The documentation is poor. When I try to use the KeyboardAvoidingView to handle the keyboard and user input. Not only the official document is limited, I can't find useful info on the Internet. I need to try and error to figure out how the component behave in iOS and Android device.
• It introduce some effort to use the native feature provided by 3rd party library. The way using 'react native link' to configure iOS and Android is not always reliable. When I used react-native-i18n , the link commend cause the 'jest-haste-map: @providesModule naming collision' issue between the pod package and the node-module package.
• - The way that facebook handle the issues is disappointing. For example, Chinese input is not handled correctly after v0.54, but it still not fixed in v0.56.

Although there are still such pain points, but it's still a great cross platform framework to build mobile applications. I will keep trying to get familiar with it.