Today a react-native version of WiSaw app went live -- the life will never be the same.
Just having better development environment and tools, allowed me, someone who's friends always say "all your apps look like they were designed by a software engineer", to come up with much better visual design. and it was not that hard after all. See for yourself. Here are some screenshots before and after:
The photos list before -- tons of white space, really confusing green circle with a number (I had "what is that" question asked millions of times.
The photos list after -- very condensed, supports screen rotation, better use of colors.
Photo's details before:
the same issues -- white space, confusing UI elements.
Photos details after:
the same as for the list -- better use of the white space, cleaner design, supports rotation.
Aside from these two screens, with react-native we've got much better control of the Camera UI -- we can easily do what ever we want, without relying on pre-fabbed components. The networking is much easier with the new async/await mechanism. Scheduling uploads in Java Script surprisingly was not as difficult as it was in Swift and Java.
Overall stability of the app seems to be much improved -- not as many crashes (even during the development). The speed of the app is decent -- I do not see a difference between the native version and the one written in react.
And the coolest of all -- iOS and Android apps work off of the same code base. How cool is that?! Now I do not have to worry about researching and mastering the same concept in 2 different ecosystems, 2 different languages.
I'm blown away how great NPMJS community is -- pretty much any problem I was faced with had a high quality NPM, which would work on both platforms out of the box, ready waiting for me to use.