Jed Bartausky:

Welcome back to another episode of the React Native Radio Podcast, episode 3 29. State of React native survey results.

Jamon Holmgren:

Mazen, did they lock you away? You seem to be in this white sterile environment right now. Where exactly are you tuning in from here?

Mazen Chami:

I'm actually tuning in from my house, but a different location now. This is my new office. We've had construction going on out of the house for about six months now and finally everything's done. We're just doing the little blue tape stuff now, but this is the office.

Robin Heinze:

Yay.

Mazen Chami:

I know, right? It's sterile because there's nothing on the walls or anything yet. The TV's not up. Nothing. It's just

Robin Heinze:

Fridge. You're going to have a TV in your office.

Mazen Chami:

That's

Robin Heinze:

Smart.

Mazen Chami:

It's also going to try and be a workout space in a way. Yeah, so it's a little detached shed or as Justin called it, the Maz-den. The Maz-den Maz-den. That's great. Yeah, so that's where I'm at now, but also happy to finally have a space that is not my kitchen table or some random room in the house.

Robin Heinze:

Yeah, we've been seeing you with some pretty random background.

Jamon Holmgren:

Yeah, just kind roll the dice

Robin Heinze:

For a while. You're like, where in the world is Ma today? Exactly.

Mazen Chami:

That was me for a while.

Robin Heinze:

That's awesome. I can say from experience getting a new office that's like yours and you can make it your own and you have your own space is really nice.

Jamon Holmgren:

Yeah, yeah. I keep thinking about building an outbuilding of some sort, like a shop or something with a nice office in it and maybe put a sauna in there and I dunno, maybe room for my tractor. Right, so

Robin Heinze:

Not a sauna, A sauna.

Jamon Holmgren:

No sauna. Sauna. Yeah, because finish as a true would say the one word recommend that everybody knows. They all mispronounce.

Anyway, let's get into our episode. We have a lot to talk about, so let's talk about our sponsor really quickly. Infinite Red is a Premier React native consultancy located fully remote in the US including in Zen's new office. We're a team of, we have about 30 people, mostly senior, well, they're all senior level developers, just not everybody's a developer. If you're looking for React native expertise for your next project, hit us up at Infinite Red slash Radio and don't forget to mention that you heard about us through React Native Radio. Definitely helps. We appreciate that. Alright, let's talk about the state of React native survey by Software Mansion. They did a fantastic job on this. I am always impressed and I feel like it's gotten better every single year. Mazen, you did an episode with bartech, I don't know, was that sometime last year? Early last year?

Mazen Chami:

Yeah, it was early last year where we talked about putting together of the survey and what all goes into it and stuff like that, so I think that was a cool episode just to see behind the scenes and hopefully it was a good prompt for people to actually fill it out.

Jamon Holmgren:

Yeah, totally. I know they got a huge response this time. Something, I mean overt is almost 3,500 people, so that was pretty awesome. Top of the list is developer background and I want to talk really quickly about the before React native. What was your background before you started using React Native? Anything stand out here for you? Two, the

Mazen Chami:

Native devs are lower on the list.

Robin Heinze:

Yeah, I think maybe we're biased because we have a lot of clients that are moving from a native app to a React native app and so we're working with native devs who are learning React native a lot, but I expected iOS and Android to be higher on this list, but it's only 10% for iOS and 13 for Android compared to 61% for React developers

Mazen Chami:

React web,

Robin Heinze:

Which also makes sense.

Mazen Chami:

Yeah,

Robin Heinze:

React Web. Yeah,

Mazen Chami:

And that's just React Web because other front end technologies are lumped in as 40% at number two,

Jamon Holmgren:

So these percentages don't add up to a hundred percent because you could choose more than one. That also stood out to me. Obviously we always love it when our native developer friends join us here in the React native world because they make it better for all of us, but it's still dominated by web and I think it will be for quite some time.

Mazen Chami:

Agreed.

Jamon Holmgren:

Now we are seeing a few people who started with Reactive, that's actually number four at 14%, which is kind of interesting.

Mazen Chami:

I guess the popularity is that high and also one thing I am noticing is a lot of bootcamps will mainly focus on React, but we'll also do a couple modules on React native and that's probably where people will get their interest in to learn more about it.

Jamon Holmgren:

I have a friend Jacob Sepinin, who was a career switcher. I had actually talked to him way back in the day. He was considering switching from his previous career and he went to a bootcamp and I did not tell him go into React native at that time. I just said, go and find something that you like and see what you want to do. He chose Android and was going through their Android stuff and went through the Android course, got out of that bootcamp and promptly got a React native job and he is been doing it for four years since, which is kind of cool, maybe five years now. And yeah, it was kind of interesting, so he probably would've chosen, started with React Native even though he had that Android developer bootcamp experience. The next section we want to talk about is the contribution to React native and building on this developer background. I know for us, we came from, we did a lot of open source. We were doing native iOS, a lot of us were web developers, so this part's always very interesting to me who's contributing to React Native Core and then who's contributing to the libraries in the ecosystem?

Robin Heinze:

It's looking like we have about 93% of people who said they've never contributed to React Native Core, which is pretty comparable to last year's numbers. They're not changing a whole lot other than more people responded to the survey overall. So there's more people that said yes, but in general it doesn't seem like people are starting to contribute to React native more.

Mazen Chami:

I think what I've been hearing a lot is it's intimidating to contribute, which is probably a factor to why this number is so low for the, I mean, I'd love to see it flipped. That would be ideal where we're contributing and also working in React native at the same time, but it's intimidating and most people don't even know where to start.

Robin Heinze:

Right, exactly. People don't know where to start and there's just a lot of context that they don't have and there's not a lot of education around learning how to contribute to React Native Core. I mean mostly education is focused on how to use React native and how to be good at building with it, but it's mostly the people at Meta that have all the mental models of how everything goes together and have the ability because it's a huge amount of context that you have to have that's very, very different from the knowledge that you'd have being a user of React native

Jamon Holmgren:

And you need to know so many different languages,

Robin Heinze:

Right? C plus plus,

Jamon Holmgren:

Right? Objective C, Kotlin, I don't know if there's any Java left

Mazen Chami:

Now. It's Swift rather than objective C.

Jamon Holmgren:

They have moved to Swift and then there's obviously there's Flow actually not TypeScript and there's I think some groovy potentially Ruby. Yeah, there's all kinds of things going on in there just to pull everything together and so yeah, I totally get that. But contributions to React native libraries is higher. That's 25%, which actually is pretty impressive to me. 25%, that's a big number.

Mazen Chami:

I think that's also because most open source repos that I've seen specifically have how to contribute section that in air quotes there, and that's usually helpful because every single library, and maybe this is something that we could do better of as a React native or just open source community in general, every package has their own way of doing things and publishing things and require you to go through different steps. So usually that contributing section walks you through what to do and it's good to have that. So I think going back to the initial point on why aren't we contributing enough to React native, there's really no starting point or education around it. While open source packages are usually almost the wild west, Hey, come fix this, and then it just kind of gets merged in and then fixed along the way.

Jamon Holmgren:

Anisha Maldi from Amazon, who is an awesome person, I've met her in a couple of different conferences. She did the recap of this section and she said that in her view it's kind of evolving. React native is evolving from learn once, write everywhere to write once, run everywhere. The thing that

The core team didn't want anybody to say because that's a lot of pressure, but it's kind of happening. And of course she works for Amazon and they're bringing that to tv as she said. There is one more section in this developer background that I want to hit on and that is industry sectors. So which industry sector are you using React native in? What struck me about this one is that there's no dominant sector. Even the top one, which is finance is only 19% and then there's health and fitness at 17, education at 17, entertainment at 15, and then it just kind of goes down like 1% at a time or even less than 1% at a time for all the way down. I don't know where the last one is. Cybersecurity at number 42. That's only 1%, but it's just React Native isn't an industry sector specific thing and even you have all these apps in places where you want to make sure who cares if it's entertainment, whatever, but sorry, people that are working in the entertainment side in terms of security, finance really needs security, but that's number one.

People are using React native all the time. I know Coinbase has been using it for years. And then on the flip side, entertainment needs performance. They're doing all this media rich stuff and yet they're number four here and 15% of our React native developers are working on entertainment apps. So it just shows that React native, it is just widely used. It's not something that is limited by what it can do. Now, one big category we do not see here, well it is on the list, but it's pretty far down is games and that's only 6%. So games obviously that's going to be a fairly low thing because there are a lot of other things out there. Unity and the new Gado, which of course I've been doing some work in and whatnot that are cross platform solutions that are specifically designed for games and React native has some capability that way, but generally speaking, people aren't building.

Robin Heinze:

It's not what it's best at.

Jamon Holmgren:

Right, exactly. Any other thoughts from you two about the industry sector side?

Mazen Chami:

I personally for one, love seeing the split because like you said, react native is not just for one industry, it's for

Jamon Holmgren:

All.

Mazen Chami:

And I was actually even looking at this list and being like, all right, cool. Where some of the most recent companies that we've worked for and looking at our list, it is not in the top five. Well, one of them is as of recent, but as of 2024, end of 2024 in this came out, we weren't in the top five, potentially not even we're in the top eight. So it's like even us who are consulting, we're consulting for some of the smaller industry sectors that are trying to make it bigger and potentially expand that percentage value for that sector. So that's pretty cool.

Jamon Holmgren:

It would be really interesting to see. It'd be hard to do on a survey, but it'd be interesting to see users like user base across all sectors react how many users are using React native apps. I know that Evan Bacon did of course, those top React native apps for the app store sections and that was pretty cool

Mazen Chami:

And stay tuned for my next iteration of the top React native apps out there. I do plan on pivoting that a little bit to focus on industry sectors too.

Jamon Holmgren:

So moving on to the next section, we're going to skip over the demographics thing because that has a lot of really interesting information, but we'll get stuck on it. We always do, so go check that out if you want to see the demographics of who answered the survey, but what APIs do you use in your React native apps? This one's always interesting, something really stood out on this

Robin Heinze:

Specifically. These are platform APIs, so the native APIs,

Jamon Holmgren:

Yes,

Robin Heinze:

Top. We have camera

Jamon Holmgren:

Which is

Robin Heinze:

Wild at 60, 67% and then notifications at also 65%, which makes notifications. Makes a lot of sense to me. Camera was a surprise.

Jamon Holmgren:

I know, right?

Robin Heinze:

And maybe it's just the type of apps we build, but I feel like we've used camera in some of them, but not a lot of them. So yeah, that was surprising. But it sounds like people also had a really positive experience with the camera API, which I think is awesome. And probably in part due to reacting to Vision Camera, which is an excellent, excellent library built by Mark Avi, who we found on the show before.

Jamon Holmgren:

Yeah, 29% said a positive experience, which is it's a tremendously, I guess three quarters said that they were fine. They didn't mark whether it was positive or not, and then only 4% said negative. So yeah, the sentiment's good. Yeah, camera notifications, we had permissions, deep links, persistence. Anything stand out to you?

Robin Heinze:

I had to chuckle at the amount of negative sentiment for deep links and notifications, which I agree with. Those are the source of a lot of pain and not through any fault of React Native

Jamon Holmgren:

Navigation's not built in, so you have to roll your own. Of course, react navigation has some ways to solve this, but the best probably is going to be expo router.

Robin Heinze:

You're at the mercy of the platforms to a large extent for both notifications and deep links, which is partly what makes them more painful.

Mazen Chami:

So I think one thing was further down the list number 29 with just under 9% RTL was on there, so right to left languages to left language. Yeah, it's good to see that out there. And also interesting how 14 of that 9% had negative experience with it and 14 had positive experience and the rest were just neutral. So interesting to see that and hopefully that kind of gets to grow in the future. And again, kind of based on my talk, I'm a little biased on that,

Jamon Holmgren:

So Cady Cramond wrote kind of the recap and she mentioned here that a really interesting point. She says that a lot of times why you go to an app is because you don't have full access to the native APIs, and so that's why camera is at the top spot, which it was last year as well. And so I think she points out a really good point there and she also talked about the negative experience with deep linking says that obviously with Expo router, hopefully it'll get a lot better. All right, let's talk state management. Ooh, everybody's favorite topic. Let's do this. Yeah,

Robin Heinze:

That's why I'm here.

Jamon Holmgren:

Yeah, right. So there's a few different ways to sort the, I don't know, it depends on what story you want to tell. There's usage, there's positivity, there's retention, there's interest, I don't know, but we're talking about all the state management solutions that everybody is talking about and I would say generally speaking, the thing that's interesting is that React built-ins are dropping a little bit. They used to be just king with 97%, it's starting to drop a little bit. It's down to 91%, which is kind of interesting. It means people are not using, some people are not using U State and whatnot.

Robin Heinze:

Yeah, that is interesting. We're also seeing a drop in Redux as well,

Jamon Holmgren:

For better or for worse

Robin Heinze:

With an almost proportional increase in Tand.

Jamon Holmgren:

I don't think that's on accident. I think people are switching from Redux to Tand.

Robin Heinze:

Yeah, I think you're right.

Jamon Holmgren:

I currently use that

Mazen Chami:

On my

Jamon Holmgren:

Project

Mazen Chami:

And I like the ergonomics of it.

Jamon Holmgren:

Yeah, it's kind of Redux Light and Redux done a little bit more modern weight. There's also obviously Redux Toolkit, RTK, but that's actually just staying kind of flat, so it feels like some people are maybe moving from Redux to Redux toolkit, although they could have probably checked both and said I'm using Redux and Redux toolkit because that would be

Robin Heinze:

Accurate. Then we have a whole crop that are all below 20%. Things like X Date our beloved MobX is down there too, which makes sense that there's some major players and then a bunch of smaller players. I know we have one project that's using X date and they seem to like it for their use case.

Mazen Chami:

Yeah, totally. In summary, Redux is still most widely used, but it's dropping, so this is like 2025 might be the year where we see something different.

Robin Heinze:

Well yeah, we'll see what next year's results are.

Jamon Holmgren:

Let's also talk about on-device storage. Anything stand out to you for this one, which is what on-device storage solutions do you use in your React native apps?

Mazen Chami:

Yeah, why are people

Jamon Holmgren:

Still using storage

Robin Heinze:

By a lot?

Jamon Holmgren:

84%? Yeah,

Robin Heinze:

There's probably some inertia with that because it was the blessed solution for so long. It was actually, wasn't it part of React Native Core?

Jamon Holmgren:

Yeah, it was, yeah, and it was distracted

Robin Heinze:

Originally. It was part of reacting to core before it was broken out, so I think there's just a lot of inertia and people just use it because that's what they've always used.

Mazen Chami:

Oh, you know what? Actually no. Okay, I take back my comment of being surprised, but still surprised why are you're still using ASIC storage, but one thing I have seen online a lot of is when you are using a third party package, most third party packages give you the async storage example and you almost have to search the issues for the MM KV version and my whole thing to that is like, okay, that's the default share that works. One thing I would point out is MMKV, just check the repo for its performance. It is performantly better. It's not, you don't have to async away so you don't have to put spinners and all that kind of stuff and all that. It's on demand. That's where we're going to with the new architecture, it's 30 times if not more faster than Async

Jamon Holmgren:

Stretch. Yeah, not 30% faster, 30 times faster. Yeah,

Mazen Chami:

Exactly. And one thing also to point out is Async storage, 4% of the respondents said they had negative experience with it while only 1% said they had negative experience with MMKV and that tracks for me, I haven't had an issue with MMKV

Robin Heinze:

31% positive.

Mazen Chami:

Exactly.

Robin Heinze:

Which is yeah,

Mazen Chami:

But I mean

Robin Heinze:

Storage, the only thing close to, the only thing even close to that is React native of MMKV storage, the other M KV library in this list.

Jamon Holmgren:

Right. Which to be honest have never used, but that's pretty cool. I mean there's an argument to be made that Async Storage should integrate one of these MMKV things and pull it in and just use it under the hood to make everything faster

Or just integrate MMKV themselves. I don't know. There was also Expo SQ L Light, which is kind of a cool library, has very positive sentiment and there's also Realm and a couple others. Watermelon DB is actually there as well. We're starting a project fairly soon that uses Watermelon db, so that's pretty cool. All right, let's move to data fetching. So data fetching is of course where you're querying across the network and for me I'm seeing Apollo dropping. It's been dropping over time. It's down to 34%. I think that just kind of mirrors just sort of the sentiment around GraphQL in general. Axios and BET itself are kind of neck and neck

Robin Heinze:

Equivalently high. Right,

Jamon Holmgren:

Exactly. And if you use API sauce, that's just Axios, it's a wrapper around Axios that we put out.

Robin Heinze:

Yeah, it's a pretty lightweight wrap or two.

Jamon Holmgren:

There's RTK query, which a lot of people use if you're using RTK and that one is growing a bit up to 23% and then Tant Stack Query otherwise known as React Query,

Robin Heinze:

Huge gains

Jamon Holmgren:

Continues to gain ground and I've heard very, very positive sentiment

Robin Heinze:

Almost. It is similar to Redux and Tristan. They're very

Jamon Holmgren:

Proportional. Yeah, I would agree.

Robin Heinze:

Tant Stack's going up the same rate that Apollo is going down.

Jamon Holmgren:

We really need to get Tanner on this podcast. We should. That'd be a lot of fun.

Mazen Chami:

I'm using Tent Stack Query in conjunction with Fetch on my project and it's very good. It's almost replacing our state management in certain parts because it does its caching and all that under the hood and if you filter this chart by positivity, number one on the list is 10 Stack Query. So that tracks in my mind it's very ergonomical and easy to use type library.

Jamon Holmgren:

Let's move to navigation. So navigation libraries. Of course the dominant one over the past many years has been React navigation, but we have a new player in town.

Robin Heinze:

Well to be fair, the new player is made by the same people who make React navigation, so it's understandable that they're taking some of their numbers, but you're of course talking about Expo router

Jamon Holmgren:

And also to be pedantic about this, but we're developers, expo Router is built on top of React navigation.

Robin Heinze:

It is built on top of react navigation. So I wonder, I'm sure there are people out there who answered the survey and checked both because they're like, well, I'm using Expo router and React navigation

Jamon Holmgren:

And a new addition to the survey is React native screens, which is actually up there at 64%. That's because almost everybody that uses React navigation has React native screens turned on, which allows you to have native screens under the hood and then Expo Router of course uses it as well. Mazen actually ran into a bunch of bugs with React native screens recently while using Expo router. We're working with Software Mansion on potentially getting that fixed, but yeah, so it's a newer, obviously Expo router is new and it has more bugs and things like that, but the ergonomics are pretty good. It's not for everybody. You may want to stay with React navigation and kind of roll your own deep linking and whatnot, but I think Evan's pretty good and we've talked about it before on this podcast,

Mazen Chami:

The whole file-based routing pattern that I think everyone is very, and it goes back to the demographics where we saw a lot of React developers coming into the game for React native. So that kind of tracks in that sense where file-based routing resonates with them.

Jamon Holmgren:

Yeah, totally. Next one is styling and what styling techniques do you use in your React native apps and Infinite Red has sort of our preferred way to do things. Let's see how it matches up. What do you notice from this chart?

Robin Heinze:

Well, I noticed that style sheet API is going from nearly a hundred percent and it's fallen to about 90% and then inline styles have taken over the top spot

Jamon Holmgren:

And explain the difference there.

Robin Heinze:

So when I first read this, I was like inline styles, how are people using inline styles? It doesn't actually mean inline,

Jamon Holmgren:

Right,

Robin Heinze:

Sticking your literally inline

Jamon Holmgren:

Object, right? Inline.

Robin Heinze:

It just means you're passing an object or an array of objects directly to the style prop rather than initiating a style sheet,

Jamon Holmgren:

Which is what we do,

Robin Heinze:

Which is what we do. We store them as variables so they're not in line.

Jamon Holmgren:

Yeah, just cons. Right. In the same files that,

Robin Heinze:

Well, because we've been saying this for years that if you look in the source code of React decor, there's this literally this basically to-do comment that was like add a style

Jamon Holmgren:

Sheet optimizations.

Robin Heinze:

Optimizations at a later time.

Jamon Holmgren:

Yeah,

Robin Heinze:

10 years years ago. It doesn't do anything.

Jamon Holmgren:

It

Mazen Chami:

Just returns

Jamon Holmgren:

The object that you give it. So why do it

Robin Heinze:

Just returns the object that you give it

Jamon Holmgren:

And it's not even typed as well as you can type it using TypeScript.

Robin Heinze:

Right. It's much easier to type it directly. Yeah, so we've been using inline styles for years. A lot of people really like the Native Wind is an up and comer.

Jamon Holmgren:

Yes,

Robin Heinze:

For sure.

Jamon Holmgren:

Yeah, that's moving up. It's now fourth 36%

Robin Heinze:

Style components saw a pretty big drop from last year. I think people are starting to move away from it.

Jamon Holmgren:

So there is a little style X 2% at the bottom of this chart, but from what I understand, style X is like it's more for web at this point. It is a pretty cool thing, but by meta, but it abstracts away by using the compiler to compile in all of your styles into a style sheet. But I haven't actually even tried it on React native. It looks like most people haven't.

Mazen Chami:

Yeah. Another one on there too for me is React Native Uni styles. That's been one that's really working on performance and no res within it they had 4% 23 and now it's 17%, so it's slow rise but he's also worked. Yes. It's also working in tandem with Mark with Nitro modules to make sure it's fully written in c plus plus.

Jamon Holmgren:

Alright, let's jump forward to component libraries. I think people will be interested in this,

Robin Heinze:

So what jumps out to me is that the very highest one in terms of usage is less than 50%. It's

Jamon Holmgren:

At 40%. Yeah, react native paper

Robin Heinze:

And I have to say the times that I've used a component library, I kind of understand it. I really prefer to build my own components. You always just end up hamstrung at some point by a component that's not configurable in the specific way that you need it to be for your year designs and so I get it

Mazen Chami:

Leveraging something like uni styles in my opinion, even though it's not a quote component library, it helps you build your component library better so that you don't have to, like you said Robin, fight with it almost like putting a, what is it, square peg in a round hole type situation. Just reach for something like you in a styles if you want and build your own component library.

Robin Heinze:

I can see reaching for it if you're building a proof of concept or you're building something without any kind of designer or designs, but for the type of project especially that we do, it handcuffs you too much.

Jamon Holmgren:

Yeah, and even really they don't mention Ignites component system, but that's sort of because Ignites component system is designed to be mostly just using your native primitives and it's all embedded in your app just like

Robin Heinze:

Chad, it's not a library that you install specifically for its components. Yeah,

Jamon Holmgren:

That's right. I want to talk about debugging. So debugging of course has always been a big deal and having tools is super important. We're also in a point where we're sort of transitioning tools, so we have the experience, we have the sentiment of the different debugging tools out there. Of course, console dot log still rules.

Robin Heinze:

Are you even a JavaScript developer if you don't have console logs all over your app

Jamon Holmgren:

And unfortunately the console log is going away from our metro connection, so we're going to have to do something different. Actually Frank and I were just talking Frank Calise from Infinite Red. We're just talking about improving the React toron support even better than it is. So that's something that's a big deal. But yeah, so then we have Element Inspector as well. That's the one that is built in to React native itself. You can actually enable it and then click on a component and look at it. It's pretty limited but it's used by a ton of people.

Robin Heinze:

Then we have React dev tools and now React native dev tools. React native dev tools being the new React native debugger that was introduced end of last year I guess. So it was pretty new at the time this survey came out and still had what 1800 people say that they use it, which is pretty impressive.

Mazen Chami:

It is and that's where all the console lugs are now rallied. That's

Robin Heinze:

Where they will Yes. Instead of the metro or where they're going to go out to the debugger, which I've used and it's pretty easy to use. It feels really integrated and it feels like official. It feels like this is supposed to be there and not just tacked on.

Mazen Chami:

I'm also kind of interested to see Flipper still on this list

Robin Heinze:

Who is still using Flipper? It's crazy.

Mazen Chami:

It's like 60%,

Robin Heinze:

1800 people. It's crazy. It's on

Mazen Chami:

The list so high. It seems very high on the list, but there's one comment where it says Flipper was by far one of the worst things to happen in the history of React native

Robin Heinze:

Is that one of the comments actually says,

Mazen Chami:

That's funny, that's Direct quote Flipper was by far one of the worst things to happen in the history of React native. It was incredibly buggy caused, built failures and never worked correctly. I'm not bashing on flipper hair, but that's like most of the comments in here are all negative experience comments. That was the first one that kind of stuck out to me. There's like three or four positive experience and I feel like most of the community is on the negative side of Flipper, so yeah, I don't know. I think we'll see less of Flipper in future ones.

Robin Heinze:

Oh well, yeah, well because it's deprecated. It's removed from React Native and Knit now, so yeah, I think it's on its way out for sure.

Jamon Holmgren:

And then there's our own React Toron, which doesn't have as much usage as we'd like. I think it's somewhere around 10% of React native developers use it. There are some legitimate issues pointed out because we haven't invested in React Toron, we've really wanted to in the past. That is starting to change. I've actually started doing, I call it hackathons where I'm hacking on React Arons on Fridays and it's already been pretty fun. There's some really good PRS out there that we're reviewing and going to get merged in. I even played around with the redesign, so look for more from React Arons soon and actually we're going to integrate native logs into React Theron. Frank is working on that right now, so that's going to make things a lot easier for seeing what the native app is actually logging out. That's awesome. Yeah, super, super cool.

Then of course radon IDE from Software Mansion is coming up and more and more people are using it. It's built into of course Visual Studio Code or Cursor and then flashlight is another kind of like a performance thing, but I think it's only for Android and then the performance API itself React native. React native performance I think is underrated. I'd like to actually integrate that with React Toron as well and make that a very, very nice experience within just checking performance across the board. So more to come jumping forward to build and publish. What stands out to you about the build and publish workflows?

Robin Heinze:

EAS is the clear winner and biggest most improved. It went from middle of the pack to Strong, strong first place in terms of usage, it's at 70% usage, which is amazing and we use it and I totally understand why it has such good usage numbers now. It works amazingly well.

Jamon Holmgren:

Yeah, app center dropping

Robin Heinze:

Poor app center, the fact that there's still 34% of people using it, they're hanging on. We have one client that's still hanging on until the very end of the deadline. When it gets turned off,

Jamon Holmgren:

It's going to be pretty soon.

So Deb Tools, this one's fun because of course our own Ignite is in the mix here and I wanted to mention that if you look at all of the different tools for scaffolding and developing React native apps, like basically knitting new React native apps, there's the React native community, CLI, and there's a whole pile of expo stuff. That's kind of what you see. And then among the community supported ones, ignite is still number one, so I find that pretty encouraging. We put a lot of time into Ignite to make it really a really good experience and people generally speaking have a very positive opinion of it.

Robin Heinze:

I also thought it was really interesting to see the huge drop in the React native CLI in 2023 when I think that probably lined up when Expo was added to the React native docs as like this is how you should start projects and yeah, expo is just at the very tippy top.

Jamon Holmgren:

Yeah, expo just dominates it because starting with your expo CLI makes a lot of sense and actually to be honest, that's what Ignite does these days. We build an expo,

Robin Heinze:

You have Ruby on Rails and you have React native on Expo.

Jamon Holmgren:

Yeah, that's true. That's true. In that same section we have package managers as well. By far the biggest is NPM with 67%, but number two was really interesting to me. 44% still use Yarn One classic Classic

Robin Heinze:

That says Yarn two was so bad and so I think people stuck with Yarn one and never wanted to upgrade. Yarn four has been, I've been using Yarn four and it's good.

Jamon Holmgren:

Yeah, exactly. And then there are some people using PNPM and then Newcomer bun, which has some bugs still, but I don't know. I'm a huge fan of bun. I've been building. Everything I build these days is in bun. If it has anything to do with Node, I use BUN both as a package manager and as a runtime in the resources section there's newsletters and news platforms and on that one we have Twitter still or X still being the number one way that people get news. There's Sebastian Lorberg this week in React newsletter and Reddit is big and our own React native newsletter, it has

Robin Heinze:

32%

Jamon Holmgren:

Of the respondents chose that, so that's pretty amazing. Definitely go check it out. If you haven't seen React native newsletter, go to react native newsletter.com and of course the section that we've been waiting for this whole time, the whole reason that we did this,

Robin Heinze:

We saved the best for less. The reason we did this episode

Jamon Holmgren:

Is

Robin Heinze:

So we could point out that the number one podcast in the survey at 63%. That's

Jamon Holmgren:

Amazing. That's pretty good

Robin Heinze:

Of respondents to this question

Jamon Holmgren:

To the question now obviously a lot of people may not have responded to this question, but

Robin Heinze:

351 people we're talking to you put Reactive radio at the top of the list, so thank you for that.

Jamon Holmgren:

Thank you so much. We appreciate you doing that. We appreciate you telling your friends about us. We put a lot of time into this episode into all episodes. Just as an example, this episode has taken an hour to record so far because there's just so much to go through and the editors have had to cut a lot of things to make this really feel good and you probably didn't notice because the editors do such a great job and the editors are literally like Infinite Red, CEO, Todd Wir and Infinite Red Director of Operations, Jed Bartowski. We don't necessarily farm this out. We have our leadership work on this and so we appreciate all of the time that we put into this being recognized by you folks in the audience.

Mazen Chami:

And we also have a new editor, Tyler Williams, who's assisting. Oh yeah,

Jamon Holmgren:

Tyler

Mazen Chami:

Assisting the team too, so who's also a senior software engineer here. Infinite Red.

Jamon Holmgren:

Yep. And maintainer of MobX State Tree.

Robin Heinze:

It's a team effort for sure.

Jamon Holmgren:

Yeah, a few others to mention Rocket Ship by Simon Grim. I've been on that podcast. He does a fantastic job. Go check it out and React Universe on Air by Call Stack. I've also been on there. We did a co episode with them, our friends at Stack and of course Osh being a very good friend and Jakob and all the others there. So really appreciate all the media that is put out by our React native friends. There's also video creators. Theo comes in number one with 35% and if you watch Theo or if you kind of keep an eye out on that, you may have seen some Infinite Red commercials, advertisements. We sponsor some of the videos on his channel, so definitely cool to see him still at number one. He gives React native a lot of love

Mazen Chami:

In our People section. We have jamon and number eight with 6%. That's awesome.

Robin Heinze:

11 people Jamon. Yeah.

Jamon Holmgren:

That's awesome. How do you feel? I couldn't even get my whole team to vote for me basically.

Robin Heinze:

That's actually hilarious.

Jamon Holmgren:

Or is that 11 comments? That's 11 comments. No, it's 11 responses.

Robin Heinze:

That's 11 comments people answering.

Jamon Holmgren:

Oh, I see. They had to write it in.

Robin Heinze:

Oh, they had to write it in. Okay.

Jamon Holmgren:

Yeah.

Robin Heinze:

Well 11 people.

Jamon Holmgren:

I appreciate

Robin Heinze:

Enough to write your name in.

Jamon Holmgren:

I think number four last year. The thing is, I don't know, I don't tweet as much as I used to and part of that is because I've started to treat my A DHD, so I don't have the Dopamine Seeking behavior. By the way, a little plug here. We did an A DHD episode. I did one and so go check that out. I forget the, we'll put it in the show notes. I forget the episode name, one of my favorite episodes. I feel like it was something that I really did from the heart. It was an episode I was very proud of. But yeah, I don't tweet about it as much. I do still, so definitely follow me if you want. I appreciate the folks that filled out my name there. Number one, Evan Bacon, number two, mark Wasabi who I think was number one last year. And those two guys, they do so much for the community. I appreciate what they do. Okay, let's jump to the opinion section and I just want to get general vibe here, Moz, and I'm going to start with you. When you looked at the opinions, when you looked at everything across the whole survey, what's your sense for where React natives at?

Mazen Chami:

I honestly think we're moving in the right direction. I think I agree with all of them. I think I'm actually haven't seen the last two sections here, but I do agree with them that yes, react native is moving in the right direction. The question about is building React native apps overly complex right now isn't leaning towards the disagree part. I agree with that. Tools like Expo and everything that comes with their tool belt is making it so much easier. Is the ecosystem changing too fast? I think this is a hard question to be put in for 2024 when you have the new architecture being added in and stuff like that, but it's leaning neutral and more towards strongly disagree. So I think that's perfectly fine. And then the pain points, I agree with it. We all have these same pain points, unmaintained packages, debugging, keyboard, avoiding stuff, dealing with native code, so it's all the same sentiments, missing features, better debugging. That's coming in the future that's been promised to us by the meta team. So looking at this, I completely agree with it kind of moving forward.

Jamon Holmgren:

What about you Robin?

Robin Heinze:

I feel really, really positively about React Natives maturity with these numbers and the thing about the pain points, they're all pain points that indicate that a lot of people are using React native,

They're feeling the pain points because they're using it. They're not abandoning it because they think it's too complex or they think it's not performant. The companies are adopting it. And so yeah, of course there's going to be developers feeling pain about certain things. That's just part of every framework. Yeah, I thought it was interesting how high the agree line is under the React native of ecosystem is changing too fast. I think that about tech in general just always like, can you guys slow down for a second? I just learned, I just learned Mak State, can I we not change state management systems again. But overall really, really positive. I'm happy to work in React native

Jamon Holmgren:

And for my opinion, you can actually go to the survey and read it if you want. I will probably tweet it out as well to talk about what I saw. Software Manion graciously asked me to provide the feedback in this one and I'm seeing steadily increasing confidence in React native 88% felt that React native was moving in the right direction. That is a huge deal. Far fewer from last year. It was 44% last year. Now only 22% think that React native is overly complex and it's just trending positive across the board. And of course debugging is now the top pain point spot, which the React native debugger, react native

Robin Heinze:

Deb

Jamon Holmgren:

Tools is making its debut. And then of course there's the usual unmaintained packages, keyboard handling, unusable error messages in dealing with Native code, but we did not see upgrades, which was number four last year is now number dm. Yes,

Robin Heinze:

Really great point. Yeah,

Jamon Holmgren:

Maybe we're starting to solve that and I think Expo as well as just the maturity of React native itself is helping. And of course moving to the new architecture, we're going to be seeing that of course hopefully better debugging all those things, better performance, whatnot is coming. I think also little things like Legend List, I mean it's not little, it's kind of a big deal, but legend list coming in is just going to improve lists and whatnot. A lot of these pain points we've had over the years are getting addressed. Not everything. I mean there's still some challenges for sure, but we're getting there and it makes me very feel very positively, which is good because, well, I kind of bet the company on this technology and I'm hoping that it keeps going for a long time. So I think that's a pretty good place to stop. Thanks to Bartech and Software Mansion for doing the State of React native survey. You can go to state of react native.com to check it out. And that's it for us. See you all next time.

Jed Bartausky:

As always, thanks to our editor Todd Werth, our assistant editor, Jed Bartausky, our marketing and episode release coordinator, Justin Huskey and our guest coordinator, Mazen Chami. Our producers and hosts are Jamon Holmgren, Robin Heinze and Mazen Chami. Thanks to our sponsor, Infinite Red. Check us out at https://infinite.red/radio. A special thanks to all of you listening today. Make sure to subscribe to React Native Radio on all the major podcasting platforms.