Hey everyone 👋
I wanted to get back into mobile development and decided to give React Native a shot again. My first experience years ago definitely left me with a sour experience, and while it somewhat started off the same….it actually got much better, so much so that I actually kind of like it now 🤔 Let’s dive into it!
As mentioned I had some speed bumps almost immediately with React Native, first setup launch was great, then a couple days later it broke and it took me hours to figure out why the starter app no longer worked…turned out it was Xcode 🤦♂️. So after wrestling with that for hours and a downgrade back to Xcode 16.2 I got the framework back up and running. Luckily the ramp up time was actually quite pleasant because the experience was more or less the same as it was 5 years ago. Of course it uses typescript and react so I was able to jump in right away and started playing around immediately.
Once I got used to the framework, I planned my very first app, a Todo list, but with a twist! Todo lists are great learner apps but I didn’t want to follow the same old style, and so I turned it into a daily goals app instead. Like a todo list app, but the intention is to use it in the mornings to map out important goals you want to tackle throughout the day, with a daily positive stoic quote for a little motivation. I looked on dribble for some design inspiration and kicked the project off! 🚀
As I navigated the development phase I leveraged Copilot & ChatGPT - I had a ton of questions navigating different libraries for this area and simply love copilot’s ability to whip up a rough UI when it came to styling. I played around with react-native-logs to help me discern the different logs I cared about, and tried to use Gluestack UI as a way to build things faster. Honestly in the end Gluestack didn’t work well for me and just added bloat but great lesson learned for future projects. I found that creating the components by hand was faster and honestly easier than installing any of the UI options I found for RN. Wish they had something like shadcn, maybe one day 🙏
About a week later and a bit of love v1.0 is out on the app store and after 72h it’s reached 30 downloads! Yeah sure there are some bugs, and maybe the color scheme could be better, but hey, progress over perfection and it’s out in people’s hands; so that’s a win 👌 For those looking for a new way to start your day, check it My Daily goals here! 👉 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/my-daily-goals/id6744537078
Until next time, happy hacking! 👨💻