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Incredible on iOS. Android support... coming soon!

This seems to be the case with a lot of cross-platform development kits. One or the other of the platforms is a second-class citizen.

It seems that all of us are salivating at the idea of having true cross-platform tools that actually work really well on all environments so I will keep my fingers crossed that Facebook can pull it off.




Having used Facebook's Android app, I would probably count them out right off the bat. That app is complete junk -- it's slow, bloated, glitchy, and so greedy with permissions it makes a mockery of the whole system.


In fairness, the Facebook app is not developed in React Native. I'd be more curious what Facebook Groups and Ads Manager are like on Android (if they even exist), since those are the touted "React Native" apps.


That's an interesting assessment. I've actually been generally impressed with it. Loads fast, seems to be pretty intelligent about caching profile images and the like, and is generally pretty responsive (on a Galaxy S5). It is pretty handsy with the permissions, though.


I think the key to our different experiences is that you're on a pretty high-end phone. The real issues with the app become more apparent the lower-end device you have.

For example, I used to have a phone with only 1gb of internal storage, on which Facebook took over 200mb on its own (far more than basically any other app). It's pretty clear that whatever the devs are doing in regard to space usage, they're doing it incorrectly.


FWIW it won't be cross platform, it will be a separate implementation for Android. The goal is the model, not the write once pipe dream.


Looking at the name of the UI components, that definitely seems to be true, as a lot of them have "ios" appended to the class name. But, even if you're writing Objective C, you might have different storyboards for the phone vs the iPad. so I don't think it's unreasonable to have different views for the different devices.

My concern is that it actually works and isn't buggy as hell on one of the platforms, which is something that I haven't found from similar toolkits.


True, but if you can write once at least the business logic, is is already a win


I am also wondering how much scope there is for writing generic interfaces that delegate to UI specific components as needed. I haven't done any native mobile development before so I'm not sure how possible this will end up being, but seems plausible.




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