Thread by @jamonholmgren

We recently did a React Native Windows project. While I'm under NDA and can't say what the app is, I do have some general observations about React Native Windows.

(This is part of our #ReactNativeAllPlatforms push!)

This project had to support iOS, Android, and Windows. It primarily was intended to work on small laptops and tablets, although we did end up supporting phones too later on.

It did not have to support web.

Overall, React Native Windows was reasonable to work with, but with some big caveats.

Many of our tickets took longer to get the features to work in Windows. Sometimes up to double or even more, above supporting iOS and Android.

One of the tougher aspects was that when we'd google for an error message, it was rare to find help, especially React Native specific help.

There are just not a lot of Stackoverflow questions/answers and blog posts out there about it, since it's so niche.

Third-party libraries certainly were an issue.

For the most part, the biggest libraries worked okay. But it's rare that the less prominent libraries would work with RN Windows, if they relied on native code at all.

(I help maintain one of the more commonly used libraries, React Native WebView, and Microsoft has a team that sends us PRs for RN Windows.)

In cases where there was a choice of several React Native libraries, we would generally bias toward the pure JavaScript versions, since pure JS libraries worked great on RN Windows.

For example, this app had a signature capability. We couldn't use react-native-signature-capture or other similar ones because they didn't support React Native Windows. We instead reached for a pure JS library, react-native-signature-canvas, which worked well. It uses RN WebView.

It actually really helps that Expo doesn't (usually) allow native coding, which encourages the ecosystem to provide JS-only solutions like react-native-signature-canvas.

We (successfully) tried to avoid dropping down into C# for native integrations. While we have people at Infinite Red who can do C# / React Native integrations, it's a more specialized skill, and would have left our client with more challenging maintenance.

We did use more WebViews than normal. For example, our entire authentication flow is actually just a WebView. Could probably have built it in RN Windows, but in the interest of time we didn't.

Reminds me a bit of the old days of React Native, to be honest!

All in all, I'm interested in doing more! We have a lot more experience now and RN Windows is a valid platform target for React Native. Send me your RN Windows projects & let's talk. :-)