I've been a React Developer for a bit now and I kind of want to dabble in mobile development. Is React Native still worth learning? Or should I just forgo it and go straight to Swift/Kotlin?
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Top comments (4)
As worth learning as ever. I think it’s a pretty damn-fine paradigm.
Many apps will be written in Swift/Kotlin, many others in React Native.
Given, however, that you currently write React, the more mind-opening thing to learn next seems like it might be the native elements that you are probably going to have to touch from time to time if you go with React Native.
What I think is really cool about learning React is that once you've completed the (slightly) steep learning curve of learning how to build things with React, you've basically gone ahead and learnt 80%+ of React Native and 80%+ of Electron too. As well as got pretty great experience of MVC architecture.
So I'd go ahead and learn it, when I did it I found it all pretty fun, and it teaches you pretty good JavaScript too.
I've written a couple of articles/guides on building some pretty cool very simple React Native apps here which you may find useful/enjoyable:
How to build an Geolocation Weather Forecast app in React Native in 30 minutes:
dev.to/andrewsmith1996/how-to-buil...
How to build an image recognition app in React Native in 30 minutes:
dev.to/andrewsmith1996/how-to-buil...
It's always worth learning whatever you decide learning. If you're good with JS and you don't want to invest time in learning Swift / Kotlin, React Native is your best bet. I'll give you my example. I am a self taught developer and I am working as front-end lead for a Delhi based startup. We have 3 androids apps hosted on Google Play Store, all in React Native. The journey of developing these haven't been a piece of cake, but at the same time I always knew that the time that was taken while debugging native code will be compensated by working swiftly on JS side. We had time and money constraints and React Native helped us a lot to achieve what we wanted.
If you know JS and React, learning RN could let you start doing mobile development right away. That's a powerful thing since you don't need to learn a new language and/or framework.
Note even if you use RN you may need Swift/Kotlin/Java/Objective-C when you need some native feature which is not available on RN yet, however RN will still simplify you a lot of work letting you re-use your knowledge on how to build user interfaces.