Are we happy with react native?

[drewvolz]

I think there’s an itch to rewrite the apps back in their respective native languages. We have explored this a little with old-all-about-olaf in objective-c and AAO-X in Swift+UIKit and SwiftUI.

Paraphrasing some ideas from the past, what goals do we have in-mind? Can we achieve these with react native?

• more platform respective of UX/UI
• take advantage of features only available in native (is the bridge too limiting for us? do we want to spend time developing bridged frameworks?)
• being respectful of the user's device energy usage so reducing the number of abstractions makes sense

I will admit that we take on a new problems by pivoting and we are pretty quick at user-facing and data passing development in our current stack.

Is it worth considering going back to native development? Are the traded pains worth it?

[drewvolz]

I don't know that we're happy managing configuration and build issues in react native or native part time. The opposite approach where we move to ship a web wrapper instead could be a lot easier to maintain.

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We could continue to ship binaries in the stores and do a webview wrapper. It’s not horrible.

I find myself disliking having apps for everything. App clips are better at being ephemeral and disappearing. Web apps live in your browser which is nice.

This is more just trying to see hypothetically if we can change things around to help us not deal with changing configuration as much.