hint: it’s a pain
If I met you about a year ago, I would have told: “I help non-technical founder design and build their first iOS app”.
From a business perspective, there is an issue with that statement. Most founders want to get both an iOS and an Android version of their app. For good and for bad reasons, but this is not the topic of this post.
So about 8 months ago I embarked on the adventure of learning React Native. I since worked on two React Native apps and a couple of native iOS apps. I now tell people: “I help non-technical founders design and build their first mobile app”.
Now that I have one React Native app in the store and another one on the way, I’m discovering an aspect of React Native I did not know about.
Maintaining a React Native app is harder than maintaining a native app.
Let me unpack this a little bit.
I have a maintenance contract with a company that had first hired me to create their React Native app. I’m lucky enough that I created the app so I know the code base well. Apart from a few: “What was I thinking?” and “Good thing it was my first app”, the code quality is good (if I can say so:-)). I installed Flow from day 1 and es-lint is keeping me honest. But even then because of a configuration issue, a…
