State of React Native 2023

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Survey: https://results.stateofreactnative.com/

Timestamps:
0:00 - 0:14 Intro
0:14 - 0:19 Responses
0:19 - 1:51 Demographics
1:51 - 2:12 State Management
2:12 - 2:26 Data Fetching
2:26 - 2:52 UI Component Libraries
2:52 - 3:11 Animation
3:11 - 3:19 Debugging
3:19 - 3:40 React Native Features
3:40 - 4:09 Deployment
4:09 - 4:30 Alternatives
4:30 - 4:45 Ending

Demographics

- This is the second year of the survey with ~2500 responses, compared to last year at ~2000 responses. For Demographics most respondents are over the age of 25, with an average experience of 2+ years in react native, but 4+ years total. And we have a huge sausage fest of 95% of the respondents being male, but 35.2% percent didn’t respond so we can still have hope. Most of the respondents come from the United states, India, and Europe. What’s surprising is only 3% make more than $200k. and about 50% percent make less than $100k per year. So it’s going to take a little more work before lambo.

Developer Background

- Most developer seem to come from React. The second and third are either frontend or backend develop. Which means they come from any coding background. What is wild is 1/3 of the respondents are open source contributors, which is an absolutely insane. Enormous open source community.
- And 1 out of 12 react native developer contribute to react native core.
- For context, there is 2,662 contributors for React Native core and it’s used my 1.8m (.14% or for every 676 users there is 1 contributor). For comparison React core, there is 1,656 contributors and it’s used by 22.7m (.0073% and for every 13,707 users there is 1 contributor).
- There is a huge open source community, meaning problems will get fixed, which makes me optimistic for the future of React Native.
- Most developer work on finance, education, and entertainment
- The OS targeted is usually a reasonably current one.
- Most developer target Android and IOS, with very few targeting Web which makes sense, but this number will probably increase as tools get better.
- Most coders are using a Mac, at a pretty insane level. Good for that IOS development on Xcode.
- Most developer coding on a team size between 1-5

Features

State Management

- State management is popping off. React hooks is strong and the retention is high and is my go to tool. The cool kids on the block are TanStack Query and Zustand which would be worth looking into. And Redux is getting the axe, as a lot of people would not use it again.

Data Fetching

- For Data Fetching I personally just use fetch API for everything, but apparently TanStack Query is poggers, so planning to use that in the future. On a side note tRPC looks great … and has a lot of github stars.

UI Component Libraries

- For styling there has been a lot of cool changes. I just StyleSheet API, and that’s simply because of the speed. NativeWind (which is basically tailwind for react native) is awesome and highly recommend for ease of use. Tamagui is the styling cool kid on the block, especially if you are looking to develop on web as well as IOS and Android. Unistyles seems interesting, but honestly I don’t know too much about it.

Graphics and Animations

- For animation ReAnimated is the GOAT, best for event handling, animations, and it’s calculations. That’s what I learned from reddit. And if you are doing any type of drawing, use skia. Also use react native lottie for animated SVG’s, but I don’t even know what a lottie is. Though I would love to win the lottery.

Debugging and Profiling

- Debugging. Honestly i just console.log everything. These are my people. Flipper seems cool … apparently, so I might look into that.

React Native features

- Important update to keep in mind is the React Native New Architecture which is coming out in late 2024. Basically you have a lot of upgrades to React Native. I’m a sheep following the herd. So I hear the word new and I assume new is better.

Deployment

- For deployments it seems like EAS build and EAS Submit are gaining traction. These will only get better. That being said, I’m basically a caveman so I manually upload. eas build costs money after 30 uploads. and I have so many errors uploading, this usually isn’t enough.
- So based on the react native salaries, I might manually upload for eternity. Fastlane seems legit for automating your build launches, but I haven’t used it yet.

React Native Alternatives

- Alternatives are pretty obvious. SwiftUI is for native IOS and Jetpack/Kotlin are both for native android basically. Flutter is a strong contender, but I why learn Dart when I already know JS. Simon Grimm just came out with a good video explaining the differences
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AiG8-wHidiA&ab_channel=SimonGrimm

Видео State of React Native 2023 канала Andrew Heim - Dev