Also Flutter is getting a lot of traction right now.
The development experience is incredible (probably why Facebook mentioned instant reload), lots of companies are trying it out e.g. Evernote and the community is buzzing with new plugins. Plus it doesn't wrap native components so the core of it just works cross-platform.
I think the flutter approach is probably the better one, since the ux stack has more control over how things are done.
Instead of being wrappers around complicated native UI libraries, it's a 'game engine' over a lower level graphics layer. It's a smaller surface area to screw up on and create abstraction leaks. You don't have to be a iOS/Android and react native expert to fix hard issues, just a flutter expert for the most part.
It's just too bad the language run time is dart and it's run by google, which is infamous for being fairly ADD with projects.
Flutter is at least open source, here's hoping that the dev community gets organized enough to have the will to adapt annual iOS updates into the Cupertino widgets once Google drops support for the project.
1. Apple doesn't refresh the UI components annually. In fact the last time it happened was 3 years ago. Not to mention that the Cupertino widgets are very limited in nature.
2. This project definitely feels different compared to some of their others. The experience is just so much better than writing iOS or Android code that I think they would be insane not to support it.
Maybe they don't do full-on refreshes a la iOS 7, but perhaps they tweak little animation physics here and there. I'm thinking of this article's critiques of Cupertino widgets feeling a bit off:
React Native had hot reloading a year before Flutter was announced. Not to take anything away from Flutter (I heard it's great!) Personally I'm rooting for all declarative UI libraries and platforms, and I'm very excited Flutter is getting traction.
eh. The wrong type of typo can take down the entire app. Other typos it can recover from. Trying to change redux components just doesn't work. All in all it isn't too hard to fool RN's hot loading.
I'd also note that hot loading is turned off by default for RN! I can see why, having it on I have to know what types of things I can use it with and what types of changes will need a full relaunch.
Let's not even get into the "reload" button and what that may or may not do. (Note: I am using expo, so I have an additional layer of bugs and abstraction on top, having to force close Expo on the phone is way too common in my experience)
The development experience is incredible (probably why Facebook mentioned instant reload), lots of companies are trying it out e.g. Evernote and the community is buzzing with new plugins. Plus it doesn't wrap native components so the core of it just works cross-platform.