Developing an app with React Native on iOS is a very good experience. On Android (which I understand is still very new), everything feels a little more complicated and I find myself writing a lot more native code than I would like.
So far I've had to write Java code for: Geolocation, Alert Dialogs, Sharing intents, Facebook login (this one wouldn't be in core anyway) and Google Maps (I would have probably written my own wrapper for this even if it was in core because I'm doing some very specific things). What's frustrating is that these modules don't contain a lot of code...
I would suggest prioritizing getting Android to feature parity with iOS over adding new features, starting with:
- Geo Location
- Net Info
- Dialog
- Intent
As of 0.24 we've open sourced all our internal Android modules that were generic enough to be open sourced.
For push notification there is a 3rd party module that we use in the f8 app.
For maps there is also a 3rd party module that is more feature-complete than our internal Android implementation so we recommend using it.
With this I think we can (finally) close this issue. Thanks so much for upvoting it everyone, it definitely helped us prioritize it. Since open sourcing React Native for Android in September, we've added the following Android modules:
Alert, AppState, CameraRoll, Clipboard, Date and time pickers, Geolocation, Intent, Modal, NetInfo, Pull to refresh view, Picker, Slider, View Pager, and WebView.
See http://facebook.github.io/react-native/docs/known-issues.html
If you are missing components, please open specific issues on Product Pains for each of them so others can vote.
(continue) Besides that, including maps into the core would require Google Play Services and Google Play Repository to be installed on dev PC to allow the Java code to compile.
That would be inconvenient for users who don't need this feature when experimenting with RN.
So we decided to hold on releasing Maps for Android into core and release it as a package when we refactor the folder structure that is more suitable for packages.
Meanwhile use https://github.com/lelandrichardson/react-native-maps, it uses a very similar API and is quite polished.
An update on maps for Android.
By the time we were going to include a maps implementation into core a community package appeared https://github.com/lelandrichardson/react-native-maps which was actually a bit more polished and works better across platforms.
I always scan the release changelog for Maps support in Android
AppStateIOS?
Spinner is much needed too!
Date/Time picker it's also missing from android
@mkonicek nice one, I see it's under "Alert". We just need something to assist with popup menus now :)
@ehesp Dialogs are in 0.17 🎉
The problem with the react-native-gcm-android is that you can't find out what notification was clicked when you tap on one when the app is closed like you can with PushNotificationIOS.
@mkonicek How are you getting on with the Dialogs, is it something we'll see in .17?
@Kuzmin Cool, thank you!
It seems that https://github.com/oney/react-native-gcm-android should be the equivalent of PushNotificationIOS on Android (even the API is very similar). I will try it and see how it works out.
If you could open source a Push notifications module that would be awesome. Doing a quick search on react.parts I haven't found one: https://react.parts/native?search=push
We don't have any internal ready-to-be-open-sourced module for push notifications. The one we use in the Ads Manager is a very fb-specific.
@mkonicek: Is there any hint for when PushNotifications might get done? Mostly looking for a ballpark estimate if it's December/January/February in order to decide wheather to write my own implementation of it. Thanks!
I'm working on Dialogs now and will likely work on WebViews next.
Now with Geo Location and Intent done, I think that WebView and PushNotifications should be given higher priority.
@tiagojdferreira
For map considered using mapboxgl or gmaps?
Google Cloud Messaging: https://github.com/facebook/react-native/issues/3423
@cosmith Thanks a lot :) Now I just need to find an alternative to MapView
@tiagojdferreira here you go https://gist.github.com/cosmith/1124ddef29e084729204 it's very crude, use at your own risk ;)
Can you share what you did for the geo location ? I would love to use it for a personal project :)
There is more work being done on parity besides adding missing modules, for example unifying the iOS ActivityIndicator and Android ProgressBar: https://github.com/facebook/react-native/pull/6897
Regarding the features that you "outsourced" to other libs, shouldn't they be added to the docs ? A dev looking for maps will probably waste a bit of time before landing on said libraries, and might even end up with a worst solution.