For a real world datapoint - my team at a FAANG invested heavily into RN over the course of years, the promoters kept touting the "only write code once!" line, and after years and years of effort in the end we managed to share only ~10% of code for any given new feature. For any given RN feature we also had to write so many APIs/hooks/setup in native code to support it that the 10% code share didn't even save us any time.

In fact, we were prevented from doing a lot of stuff that we wanted to do, because RN either A) didn't support it (because iOS didn't have a similar concept), or B) we were gated on upgrading / using something because it depended on doing a massive RN version upgrade, which nobody wanted to schedule the time for. So I'd argue it was a net negative to productivity overall.

I could continue ranting and raving about this for many paragraphs but I'll limit it there. Not a fan.

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creamyhorror 2 hours ago | parent [-]

We're looking at moving to Expo from RN precisely to reduce the pain & risk of RN+dependency upgrades just to stay compatible.

Google (and Apple) have been keeping us on the upgrade treadmill, so I'm hoping Expo can be responsible for handling that and maintain a stable API for our apps and dependencies.

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terandle 10 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Have had our apps on expo for a while. Highly recommend, much easier upgrades and you can turn off any platform vendor stuff like their OTA updates and do local builds also. Expo + RN has saved us a ton of time on our apps and no way a small team like us could support both platforms otherwise.

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sagacity 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

What makes you think Expo is not going to just be more of the same? Genuine question.

	▲	no_wizard 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		They manage so much of the pain points, like the toolchain, building, releasing etc. It’s night and day compared to using RN directly