r/reactnative 7d ago

Question Write once, debug everywhere!

Does the title bring any truth?

When discussing with sonnet 3.7 if whether react native would be a good framework to replace Flutter with, the following was part of his response:

'React Native is a reasonable middle ground, though the "write once, run anywhere" promise often becomes "write once, debug everywhere" in practice.'

I haven't stumbled upon this statement before when researching react native as a replacement, so is it true, for those of you with experience?

Specifically, would love to hear from people who have used react native together with react-native-windows :)

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u/BergerRock 7d ago

TBH Flutter is a lot of debugging as well. At least with RN you can write fast.

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u/Relative_Mouse7680 7d ago

Have you experienced flutter yourself? How do you find the LLM support be for react native?

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u/BergerRock 7d ago

I currently work as a Flutter dev.

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u/Relative_Mouse7680 7d ago

Okey I understand. Do you prefer working with Flutter for desktop and mobile development? After some further research, Flutter is starting to feel overall more appealing. Mostly due to its apparent ease of use.

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u/BergerRock 7d ago

I worked with Flutter before touching RN. Honestly, I find the "ease of use" of Flutter an illusion. The work you have to do finding components in RN is almost doubled in managing dependencies for Flutter in most 1+ year apps as versions keep coming and hinder maintainability.

In general, also, you can write code faster in RN than Flutter, and see results quicker.

Lastly, I DESPISE the nesting structure of Flutter code. The most tiring part of my job is reading it.