React native became one of the foremost frameworks as soon as it was released by Facebook in 2015. Various developers, as well as IT giants, understood its value and started utilizing react native for their different projects.
Over the years, react native has become one of the go-to-choice of various startups due to its amazing benefits. However, there are also some limitations associated with react native. Due to this, popular companies like Airbnb, Udacity, and some others decided to drop react native.
You may be wondering, why did these big companies leave react native suddenly? These companies dropped react native as soon as they understood that it would not be beneficial to them in the near future.
To clear all your doubts, here we will provide some of the limitations of react native development that you should keep in mind before you choose react native Development.
If you are a startup or a big organization, you should consider the challenges mentioned in this post. By following these points, you will have a clear idea of what you should consider when you hire react native developer for your next project.
Limitations of React Native App Development
1.Performance Issues
Even though react native is one of the leading frameworks, you are going to face performance issues. This is because the framework is not mature enough. However, the react native team at Facebook states that they are about to launch a new architecture that will solve the majority of issues related to performance. Also, the new architecture is anticipated to resolve issues of bridge serialization as well as asynchronous communication between native & javascript elements.
2.Dependency on Native App Developers
Even though react native is used for cross-platform app development, however sometimes you will require native developers to carry out certain operations. You have no other option but to take help from native developers while carrying out heavy computational operations on an application made using react native..
Apart from this, while accessing SDK like Google Analytics, you have to be familiar with the native library’s core functions to easily integrate react native code with it.
During such times, you want to get rid of the computation in the native part, and for this, you will need a native developer.
3.Limitations in Abstraction Layer
To integrate extra functionality using react-native, an abstraction layer is formed. Due to this layer, you are going to face the following issues:
● Finding errors that are detected in the abstraction layer is really tough
● Rely heavily on the third-party services as well as libraries to keep framework up-to-date and stop it from falling apart
4.Utilize custom designs for native language
One more drawback of the abstraction layer is that you are compelled to implement custom designs in native languages like Java, Objective-C or Swift. Due to this, various mobile app developers refrain from using a hybrid framework.
5.Same Components will function differently in react-native
While developing an app using a cross-platform app development framework, it is frequently supposed that the app will work similarly on Android & iOS. However, this is not correct for several cases.
To overcome these challenges during the app development phase, you should look for experts when you choose to hire react native developer for your project.
6.Doesn’t provide Multiprocessing or Parallel Threading
React native just has one JavaScript thread , as a result of this you will face performance issues while implementing two processes parallely. For example, if you want to integrate live chat & video surfing in parallel, then it can’t be achieved using react native.
7.Heavy Dependency on Third-Party Libraries
React native development is absolutely fine. However, in several use cases, you are required to verify and access the stability of the applications. During such times, you depend extremely on libraries or resources present in third-party. This problem is anticipated to be there for one more year, hence you should check whether enough libraries are available before starting app development.
8.Obsolete Third-Party Libraries
We have already mentioned the dependency of third-party libraries in react-native development. Moreover, in react native, updates occur every now and then. Due to this, various third-party services and libraries become obsolete.
Based on the support of the community for a specific library, you may be able to keep your app updated or face collapsing problems..
9.Need of Developer with skills of more than one platform
Several times, while making an application in react native, developers have to forcefully switch back and forth in native and JavaScript counterparts. In short, rather than writing code only once and then leaving it, developers have to maintain code depending on the platform such as Android, iOS, and React.js.
10.OS Deployment is somewhat difficult
React native developers might find it irritating to test applications using any other testing services apart from Apple’s Testflight. The main reason behind this is that developers have to face issues of acquiring necessary certificates and provisional profiles.
Developers don’t face any issue in Android, because it is extremely fast to test as well as deploy an Android application.
11.Debugging styles are inappropriate in react native
Debugging styles are somewhat improper for a new web developer as you can’t just rely on the chrome debug tool to define all the properties of an element.
React native also consists of an inspector using which you can debug styles. However, it is really tough to debug styles when code covers most of your screen.
Conclusion
Here we complete the list of some of the most common issues that are faced by react developers all across the globe. If you are not able to solve any of the limitations of react native, you have complete freedom to choose any other framework. Lastly, we recommend you to select a framework as per the requirement of the project and not considering it’s limitations.
