
Ask HN: What popular apps were made exclusively with React Native or Flutter? - Elect2
I know some apps that are partly using RN or Flutter. But I&#x27;m interested to know what app can be made fully by RN or Flutter.
======
RubenSandwich
Dawn Chorus an app I worked on, which was featured on the iOS app store[1],
was written completely in React Native.

Here are the App Store links:

iOS: [https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/dawn-
chorus/id1146931666?mt=...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/dawn-
chorus/id1146931666?mt=8)

Android:
[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.dawnchorus...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.dawnchorus&hl=en_US)

We even open sourced it: [https://github.com/CMP-
Studio/DawnChorus](https://github.com/CMP-Studio/DawnChorus)

I believe it is an example of a high fidelity and quality React Native app on
two platforms.

[1] [https://rubennic.com/static/img/Dawn-
Chorus.png](https://rubennic.com/static/img/Dawn-Chorus.png)

~~~
metachris
Looks like a beautiful app. Installed and tested... snooze is not working. See
the reviews // just tested it myself on Android -- snoozing once will just
disable the alarm when it should ring the next time.

~~~
RubenSandwich
Unfortunately I'm not longer on the team that created the app. But feel free
to create an issuie: [https://github.com/CMP-
Studio/DawnChorus](https://github.com/CMP-Studio/DawnChorus).

------
dangelov
Slightly off-topic, but it's super interesting to see Flutter (which seems to
be by Google), use Visual Studio Code (by Microsoft) and an iPhone X simulator
(by Apple) as their main demo. I guess it gets the point across.

~~~
slow_donkey
I'm actually really happy they've invested in a vscode plugin. The Android
story of being forced to use Android Studio was not fun, even considering how
good Intellij is

~~~
bybjorn
Have you tried IntelliJ IDEA? It’s great for Flutter development.

------
thijser
Our site (AppBrain) indexes which Android app contain which libraries. This
doesn't indicate exclusive use of a framework of course, but the trend is very
clear that React Native is much more popular than Flutter. React Native has a
number of 1 billion+ downloaded apps, whereas the biggest Flutter app is 1
million+.
[https://www.appbrain.com/stats/libraries/details/react_nativ...](https://www.appbrain.com/stats/libraries/details/react_native/react-
native) vs
[https://www.appbrain.com/stats/libraries/details/flutter/flu...](https://www.appbrain.com/stats/libraries/details/flutter/flutter)

~~~
thosakwe
Well, I mean, considering the fact that React Native came out long before
Flutter was released, it would be very surprising if Flutter superseded the
amount of downloads already.

------
indy
Hamilton was built with flutter.

[https://medium.com/flutter-io/video-hamilton-app-built-
in-3-...](https://medium.com/flutter-io/video-hamilton-app-built-in-3-months-
with-flutter-reaches-1m-installs-f37f81856be4)

------
m_ke
Our app (Bitesnap) is made with RN. Another popular one is Gyroscope.

\- [https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/bitesnap-photo-food-
journal/...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/bitesnap-photo-food-
journal/id1108291490?mt=8)

\-
[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ai.bite.biteap...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ai.bite.biteapp&hl=en_US)

\- [https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/gyroscope-
health/id110408505...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/gyroscope-
health/id1104085053?mt=8)

\-
[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.gyroscope....](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.gyroscope.gyroscope&hl=en_US)

~~~
andrewingram
Gyroscope is one of those apps that's extremely aesthetically pleasing, but
I'm always reluctant to use as an example of React Native. Mainly because none
of the interactions feel "right". It's always reminded me of those highly
polished Flash websites that look amazing, but something always seems off when
you use them.

From the screenshots Bitesnap looks nice, but I can't seem to download it in
the UK.

~~~
flanbiscuit
curious what you mean by not feeling right or seeming off? Those are very
vague reasons. I'm not a user of this app, nor a developer.

~~~
andrewingram
To be honest, it's a vague feeling. Similar to the uncanny valley of special
effects in movies.

There's a lot of UI elements that have the appearance of (heavily-stylised)
native ones, but not the behaviour. You can't swipe back on screen
transitions, tapping the selected tab icon doesn't scroll the screen to top,
everything feels almost imperceptibly sluggish. Lots of little things like
these.

------
mattdennewitz
until recently, airbnb made a substantial effort to integrate react native.
project immaturity and a need for faster version releases necessitated
maintaining an internal fork. they've since begun to move back to platform-
native languages.

[https://medium.com/airbnb-engineering/react-native-at-
airbnb...](https://medium.com/airbnb-engineering/react-native-at-
airbnb-f95aa460be1c)

~~~
devmunchies
It’s like twitter moving off rails back in the day. That doesn’t mean it’s a
bad choice for smaller projects where dev speed is more important than
scallability.

------
rawrmaan
My game Falcross is written entirely in RN, and I believe it is the biggest
production game on either store that's full RN:

[App Store]: [https://itunes.apple.com/in/app/falcross-logic-
puzzles/id500...](https://itunes.apple.com/in/app/falcross-logic-
puzzles/id500195713?mt=8)

[Google Play]:
[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.rawrmaan.f...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.rawrmaan.falcross&hl=en_US)

------
afsina
Although production quality, Flutter is not even 1.0.0 so don't expect a lot
of public applications yet.

~~~
Gys
RN is at 0.55-RC according to [https://facebook.github.io/react-
native/versions](https://facebook.github.io/react-native/versions)

For open source frameworks the versions do not seem to be much indication for
their maturity.

~~~
oorza
(six months into a react-native project)

RN isn't production-ready/stable yet either. They're about to do a major
overhaul of the internals because of fundamental flaws that have been surfaced
by the community. While it's possible to use RN in production, "stable" is a
laugh... there are monthly releases and almost all of them have some kind of
breaking changes, so pacing RN releases is a huge fucking hassle. For example,
in the release that comes out this month (currently in RC), they changed the
Native Module API so if you have any native code that exposes a JS API (and
who doesn't?) you have to refactor a bunch of code. And because it's JS, the
only way you get compiler errors is if you're using Flow.

~~~
askthrowaway
Also the bug introduced in 0.55.3 where deleting from TextInput a few times
make it very slow.. To fix it I have to upgrade to higher version which drops
support for iOS 8 !!

~~~
je42
they broke fetch's cookiesupport in one release...

------
benjaminasmith
Not exactly "popular" (only 10k downloads), but my Pathfinder spell tracking
app is built 100% Flutter:
[https://www.spelltrackerapp.com/](https://www.spelltrackerapp.com/)

------
seangransee
Sushi Count, the market leading app for counting sushi, was built with React
Native.

[http://www.sushicount.com/](http://www.sushicount.com/)

[https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/sushi-
count/id655076814?ls=1...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/sushi-
count/id655076814?ls=1&mt=8)

[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.seangranse...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.seangransee.sushicount)

------
onewland
Don't know how you define popular but I'm pretty sure Eaze (weed delivery
service) is all React Native.

------
ponyous
[https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/meme-generator-by-
zombodroid...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/meme-generator-by-
zombodroid/id645831841?mt=8)

The app on play store has 10m+ installs, I had to clone it to iOS and since
I'm a web dev I used React Native. Haven't seen stats for sometime but I
assume it has 100k+ MAU at this point.

Another one: [https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/in-window-social-
experience-...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/in-window-social-experience-
design-stories-collections/id1047667565?mt=8&app=itunes&ign-mpt=uo%3D4)

This is the first app I built (with a team). Development started with React
Native version 0.7. And I think it's a good example of possible user
interactions. Example app features:

\- Gyro to "navigate" around images (looks neat and it's smooth, not sure you
can do much better with native)

\- Blur & parallax scrolling (On old phones (iPhone 5 and less) performance
could become a little janky)

\- Lists with 1000s of items (just want to say performance is good if you
handle it properly)

^ Note: you need to register to see anything in this one

React Native has come a long way, but most of the stuff was already possible
two years ago. Personally I never found myself in a situation where something
wouldn't be possible. If it was impossible in RN then we simply made a bridge
to Obj-C and boom, double the ecosystem of available libraries.

------
anothergoogler
ITT: People promoting their unpopular React Native apps.

------
applecrazy
A while ago I saw on HN a postmortem on Airbnb’s use of RN for their mobile
app[1]. It was an interesting read and went into quite a bit of detail.

[1]: [https://medium.com/airbnb-engineering/react-native-at-
airbnb...](https://medium.com/airbnb-engineering/react-native-at-
airbnb-f95aa460be1c)

------
jqbx_jason
Same preface (not exactly popular...yet) but the JQBX mobile apps:
[https://www.jqbx.fm](https://www.jqbx.fm) are built with RN. The only
"native" parts are a bridge for playing audio but I'm not sure if that's what
you meant by "fully" RN or not.

------
aplummer
I would like to know about Xamarin too if anyone has them. Particularly
looking for high fidelity creative / UX

~~~
opayen
Microsoft News is built with Xamarin (source:
[https://twitter.com/migueldeicaza/status/1009433494840336384](https://twitter.com/migueldeicaza/status/1009433494840336384))

\- Android:
[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.microsoft....](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.microsoft.amp.apps.bingnews)

\- iOS: [https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/microsoft-
news/id945416273?m...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/microsoft-
news/id945416273?mt=8)

------
nprz
Our app, Sift Connect, was built entirely with React Native. I started the
project with no android or iOS experience. We have a collective ~1000 daily
active users and a 70 NP score.

iOS: [https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/sift-
connect/id1213640928?mt...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/sift-
connect/id1213640928?mt=8)

Android:
[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.justsift.c...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.justsift.connect)

------
chirag04
May not be as popular anymore but Lrn app was built with RN and was featured
by Apple on the home page in 110+ countries. Still has a sticky spot in the
education category in 10 countries and has about half a million users. Not
maintained anymore tho.

iTunes: [https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/lrn-learn-to-code-in-
html/id...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/lrn-learn-to-code-in-
html/id1019622677?ls=1&mt=8)

Another app that comes to my mind is from vouge. It was also featured by Apple
on the home page.

------
dw2
Again, not exactly popular (as of yet), but our app 'Workshop' is an example
of a heavily video based RN app:

\- [https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/workshop-go-
learn/id12361257...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/workshop-go-
learn/id1236125772)

\-
[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ws.workshop.ap...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ws.workshop.app)

------
marcocot
Maybe not "popular" but this is made entirely in RN:
[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.uefa.euro2...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.uefa.euro2016)
[https://itunes.apple.com/it/app/uefa-european-
qualifiers/id1...](https://itunes.apple.com/it/app/uefa-european-
qualifiers/id1061115611?mt=8)

------
noso
RecBox.io was built with React Native

IOS: [https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/recbox-
io/id1378437194?ls=1&...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/recbox-
io/id1378437194?ls=1&mt=8)

Android:
[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.recbox](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.recbox)

------
siralonso
Our last app (Chorus, a podcast player mashed up with a social network,
[http://chorus.am](http://chorus.am)) was built entirely in react-native -
with the exception of the streaming implementation. In my mind, it's a great
example of the optionality that RN gives you: easy cross-platform UI dev with
an escape hatch to write native code when you need to.

~~~
globuous
It's a shame expo.io doesn't provide background audio [0], they've been saying
for years that "it's be supported soon" but it still isn't...

That being said, expo.io is absolutely amazing if you need to use native
features through RN without touching O-C/Swift

[0]
[https://docs.expo.io/versions/v28.0.0/sdk/audio](https://docs.expo.io/versions/v28.0.0/sdk/audio)

------
adamqureshi
I have a tiny marketplace start up and am building an iOS app for it. I know a
strong dev who can build it in SWIFT + Firebase. BUT i am thinking (seeking
feedback) if there are ANY advantages to using RN? I am not even considering
flutter. I just want the app not to suffer from any performance issues. I am
leaning towards shipping to app store ASAP. ( maybe 2-3 months)

~~~
_bxg1
Well the obvious advantage of using React Native is portability to Android.
The less-obvious advantage is partial portability to the web (would still take
additional dev work, but some code could be shared) and the ability to hire
JavaScript developers instead of Swift developers, of which there are lots
more.

But if it's definitely an iOS exclusive and you don't plan on scaling your dev
team up massively in the future, then there's no reason not to just use Swift.

~~~
adamqureshi
Thank you! Yeah for version 1 its iOS, most of my customers are on iphone. the
other thing i need feedback on is, do i charge charge $1 to download the app
or not? i do plan to charge to list your item for sale. Last i heard apple
takes 22%? no way im gonna run ads on it.

~~~
_bxg1
Unfortunately I have no qualifications to give an opinion on that question

------
mikece
Is there a larger question about how many cross-platform, non-hybrid
applications are out there and which is the best stack for doing likewise? The
field includes: Flutter, NativeScript, React Native, Ruby Motion, Xamarin,
KikApp (PHP), PyMob and Kivy (python), RubyMotion (Ruby)... and of course C++.

~~~
joshstrange
Also Cordova/Ionic

~~~
mikece
That would be hybrid but I gather from the question that there's a goal to
avoid that stack.

------
chadwilken
Our app, CompanyCam, is entirely React Native. We did write some bridges for
our camera, but you can still lay it out in React Native so its mainly React
Native.

------
Reedx
For those that have used both Flutter and RN (or NativeScript), which did you
end up preferring? What would you use for your next project?

------
ved_a
Myntra (India's largest fashion ecommerce portal) has both the Android and iOS
apps built with RN

------
findmory
Go90 the free streaming video app from Verizon (that is being sunsetted on 31
July) is built in RN

