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Back on the react-native saddle

I'm back in writing a react native app. This time it is a rather complex one. It is to work fully offline and render some 3D models. As a bonus, we are writing it in TS.


The project setup was somewhat painful. We took some inspiration from the Ignite seed project but used the official TS template. The most challenging thing was to get the testing library to work correctly.


Why react native? 


The company has mostly React developers so that jumping to mobile should be a bit easier. I suggested Flutter, but that did not stick primarily due to prior analyses, and they had already made some spikes with RN. React is an excellent way to write user interfaces, so I was not too inconvenienced.


There is the argument that react-native has a lot of abandonware, and I've had that feeling frequently during the last few months.


I took a look at the awesome react-native list. The list itself is not updated frequently. Furthermore, I took a look at the last time the most popular libraries were updated.



Seeds
Ignite: 4 days ago
Pepperoni: 3 years ago
Snowflake: 3 years ago

Utilities:
upgrade-helper - Yesterday
react-native-debugger - 10 days ago
haul - 4 days ago

Other Platforms
react-native-web ★10904 - 2 months ago
react-native-macos ★10453 - Deprecated
reactxp ★7268 - Deprecated

Animation
react-native-animatable - 7 months ago
react-native-interactable - 6 months ago
react-native-reanimated - Last month

Integrations
react-native-wechat - 8 months ago
react-native-facebook-login - 7 months ago
react-native-google-signin ★1123 - 4 days ago

Backend
rn-fetch-blob - 2 months ago
reactivesearch-native ★1218 - 17 months ago
react-native-meteor ★673 - 2 years ago

Storage
RxDB ★12797 - 8 hours ago
WatermelonDB ★4649 - 19 hours ago
realm ★3184 - 28 days ago

Media
react-native-camera ★6227 - 5 days ago
react-native-video ★3470 - 4 days ago
react-native-sound ★1556 - 5 months ago

Web
react-native-webrtc ★1805 - 4 months ago
react-native-webview-bridge ★1112 - 5 months ago
react-native-safari-view ★387 - 4 years ago

System
react-native-firebase ★4192 - 20 hours ago
react-native-push-notification ★3431 - 10 days ago
react-native-device-info ★3145 - 11 hours ago

Build & Development
reactotron ★9198 - 9 months ago
react-native-code-push ★5184 - 2 months ago
react-native-webpack-server ★935 - 4 years ago

Internationalization
fbt ★3202 - 20 minutes ago
react-native-localize ★603 - 1 month ago
react-native-globalize ★192 - 2 months ago

Geolocation
react-native-background-geolocation ★1316 - last month
react-native-mauron85-background-geolocation ★657 - 9 months ago
react-native-geocoder ★344 - 3 years ago

Utils & Infra
detox ★3566 - 1 hour ago
react-native-workers ★616 - 4 years go
react-native-mock ★504 - 3 years ago

Analytics
react-native-fabric ★1097 - 2 years ago
react-native-google-analytics-bridge ★1071 - deprecated
react-native-google-analytics ★325 - deprecated

Text & Rich Content
react-native-hyperlink ★354 - 5 months ago
react-native-draftjs-render ★253 - 17 months ago
react-native-html-to-pdf ★171 - 6 months ago

Navigation
react-navigation ★14233 - 1 day ago
react-native-navigation ★9325 - 15 days ago
react-native-navigation-hooks ★109 - 12 hours ago

UI
lottie-react-native ★10415 - 6 days ago
react-native-vector-icons ★9985 - 3 months ago
react-native-maps ★8388 - 11 days ago


So it might not be as bad as you would think. I glanced through awesome ios and android, and they also had plenty of old, dated, seemingly not maintained libraries.


As usual, when you consider taking some library into use, do check

  1.  when was the last commit
  2.  the issue list (a good example https://github.com/luggit/react-native-config/issues/382)
  3.  the activity metrics
  4.  how many stars 🤷


If it is a library that uses some very stable native API, it might be perfectly ok if it has not been updated in a while. While digging into the native code might be intimidating (especially Objective-C), it's not that bad honestly, and understanding what lies under the hood brings confidence in use.

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