Well there's nothing absolutely 'wrong' with them. You can write good and bad apps with view controllers (I've done both). But they're an architectural blank slate, mainly offering access to UI objects & lifecycle callbacks. You need some architecture on top in anything but the most trivial app. The naive approach is to have 'no architecture', which actually is an architecture of just throwing masses of state, ad hoc, into the view controller, and using this to effect the UI any old how (so a 3rd party has no idea where to look to find out where things happen). Or you can go maximalist and select from MVC, MVP, etc, all of which are an improvement on the naive approach. It just so happens that I've found RN (React Native) to be the nicest improvement, to my taste. Simple unidirectional data flow & UI state being a simple function of app state make for a beautifully clean and unambiguous model for how everything fits together. One can argue the costs and benefits of app architectures all day, but there's really no substitute for trying them out, for the sake of curiosity & learning. All the devs I know who have written RN groan a bit when they're back in iOS and/or Android native development, and absolutely not because they love javascript! Check out Andy Matuschak's celebrated Tweet on RN (twitter.com/andy_matuschak/status/56051…). I point to it not as an argument from authority. But if one of the people who wrote UIKit thinks RN's model is the superior one, surely that should pique curiosity just a bit? > Are you suggesting React solves the programming language problem completely I'm not sure what you're getting at here. What 'programming language problem'? And why would an improvement have to solve something 'completely' to be of value?

Having done years of iOS and web development, React Native is a far better developer experience than Xcode. Take it from a former UIKit author: twitter.com/andy_matuschak/status/56051…

> They are using Reactive Native for a lame duck Groups and some ad manager app. "Some ad manager app" which happens to be the ad manager for one of the largest advertising platforms on the planet right now. It's also composed of non-trivial UI, you should try it before blindly bashing it. I've used both Cordova, and Titanium, too, by the way - Cordova was relatively painless but lacked the native feel. Titanium sort of had the native feel but it was slow. The Titanium community also felt very hostile towards competition and they didn't promote FOSS. Maybe you're a Titanium developer? > Unfortunately they are marred by poor API support, performance and customization. Web apps can hit 60fps these days (again, using React (Canvas)). > Here's the litmus test. Ask the Reactive Native team to port their non-trivial paper app or mission critical messenger app or main app to Reactive Native. That's a really lame litmus test considering they've got a massive code base in native languages with no reason to throw them away since they're working perfectly and they have a ton of developers to throw at the problem. > They are using Reactive Native for a lame duck Groups and some ad manager app. They appear to be using React Native for most new apps that they develop. I would assume it would be up to the discretion of the team to choose whether or not to use React Native. Most do because React Native is way better than plain old native. Even the author of UIKit thinks so.[0] I'd be interested if you could provide a common real world example where React Native wouldn't be a good fit. Furthermore, React Native never claims to be a total replacement for native. We openly acknowledge that some problems are best solved in native code. That's why React Native has excellent support for 3rd party modules. [0] twitter.com/andy_matuschak/status/56051…

Declarative UI is boss. I know Andy (former UIKit team) was quoted in the intro thread but I'll do it again: >I say with confidence as a former UIKit author: React's model for the UI layer is vastly better than UIKit's. React Native is a huge deal. twitter.com/andy_matuschak/status/56051… If you're averse to React because of JSX, “mixing templates and views” and similar superficial “best practices”, you're missing out. Engineers embracing React are not dumb. You should consider a possibility that they think it's good for a reason, and that reason is something you should learn about instead of armchair-rejecting it. Try tuning out your inner rule-of-thumb linter for a weekend and really give it a try.

"I say with confidence as a former UIKit author: React's model for the UI layer is vastly better than UIKit's. React Native is a huge deal." twitter.com/andy_matuschak/status/56051…

::cough:: twitter.com/andy_matuschak/status/56051…