The repo is archived!
The objective is to add react-native dependencies to a vanilla Android app. This goal being to use react-native without commiting entirely to the platform.
Benefits are :
- Keep an exiting app setup, i.e. do not plainly move and commit to the platform.
- Use the power of react-native :
- To handover certain apsect of an app to non-android developerse (sign in / up for instance)
- To prototype quickly.
Reac-native is a plaform and one may not want to move an entire app to it.
Good reasons are :
- It has impact on the file structure, and on the IDE integration
- The plaform is still immature
However, react-native is promissing and can already used to prototype or could even be used to integrate modules.
it has to be >= 16.
React-native require your applicattion to implement the ReactApplication interface to run. This means that the app needs to add a dependency to 'com.facebook.react:react-native`.
The latter is a npm dependency so to work well outside of a react naive project (a project initialized with react-nmatie init and containing a folder node_modules) it has to be deployed to a maven repository.
Including this has an overhead in size :
- 1.5M normal.apk
- 8.5M react_native.apk
- 7.9M react_native.apk proguarded
There is not much we can do about that since about 6M comes from react-native ndk libraries (compiled for arm64-v8a, armeabi, armeabi-v7a x86 , x86_64).
It has also an overhead in method count (w/o running proguard) :
- 21113 normal.apk, cf dex count
- 36622 react_native.apk, cf dex count
- 22268 react_native.apk proguarded, cf dex count
A little customization has been required to package the aar library (but not too bad).
apply plugin: "com.android.library"
project.ext.react = [
bundleInDebug : true,
jsBundleDirDebug: "$buildDir/intermediates/bundles/debug/assets",
jsBundleDirRelease: "$buildDir/intermediates/bundles/release/assets"
]
If the footpint is a concernt, an other alternative would be to constraint react-native to protoyping and in a specific flavor and therefore has no impact on production app.
- crash reporting ?