An iOS Developer on React Native

When I first caught wind of React Native, I thought of it as nothing more than a way for web developers to dip their feet into native mobile apps. The premise that JavaScript developers could write an iPhone app in JavaScript was definitely something that I thought was really cool, but I quickly shrugged off the idea of using it myself. After all, I had already been doing native iOS development as a hobby for many years, and professionally with Chalk + Chisel (formally Bolster) for almost two years at that point. I had already made dozens of iOS apps — good apps that I was proud of. Apps built in Xcode and written in Objective-C, because that’s the way it’s always been. That’s what Apple gave us to make iOS apps, so that’s what I and every other developer used. Then, two years ago when Apple released the Swift programming language, I didn’t hesitate to try it out. It was still in Xcode, and it was still (obviously) Apple-approved for developing iOS apps, so I dove right in and picked it up pretty — ahem — swiftly. I was content in my Apple ecosystem bubble. React Native seemed like a fun little experiment, but in my mind any real native app would still need to be written the real native way. It seemed like a waste of time for me to not only learn JavaScript (I had no experience), but an entirely new way of building apps when I was already beginning to master building them the “real” way.