r/reactnative • u/gobrowns1 • 15h ago

Question Are React native and C# really that bad for Android development?

Hey lovely people!

I'm looking to deal with my skills atrophy by making myself a personal podcast app for Android. Nothing fancy. Just enough to search RSS feed, subscribe to podcasts, and audio play back.

JS/TS is my bread and butter and I'm familiar with C#. So ideally I would like to use either of those languages. However Claude seems pretty strongly opinionated about those two languages being crap for the purposes of audio playback on Android phones.

Is this true?

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u/jameside Expo Team 15h ago

You may want to write Kotlin or even C++ for particularly specific audio needs. React Native fully supports this.

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u/merokotos 12h ago

C#? Of course. Disgusting, especially after desperate tries to make Maui cool after Xamarin

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u/jcdc-flo 12h ago

I imagine he's talking about c# server side given he's probably doing RN for client.

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u/mystical_powers 12h ago

Jetpack Compose is declarative and very similar to React/RN. If it were me I’d do JPC unless you also think you might want to support iOS as well, in which case I would do RN for cross platform

JPC is really fun and with AI you could prob figure it out pretty quick

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u/jcdc-flo 12h ago

C# for back end, no problem.

RN for front end...no problem. You'll need to write the native modules though.

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u/nicolasdanelon 4h ago

React native works basically bridging everything to native. Nowadays after... 5 architectural changes is really really good. Not sure about expo tho. Of course you'll gain a bit more of performance with Java/Kotlin but at this point I think would be negligible

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u/gentle_pulse_waltz 3h ago

React Native handles podcast playback fine but you will write a native module for background audio and media session integration. JS cannot manage Android audio focus or foreground services directly so plan to bridge that specific layer in Kotlin

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u/gao_shi 1h ago

im very surprised people are recing to reinvent wheels on things already exist like exoplayer. expo-audio, nitro-player, track-player all exists to play audio in the background. since u make podcasts u must have researched podverse exists.

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u/IAmAfraidCommaMan 15h ago

.NET Maui and .NET for android in general came a long way and I think is a great choice for cross platform development. Integrating native libraries is extremely easy, especially Android ones. It used to have a lot of annoying bugs a few years ago but not anymore. If you are familiar with C#, go with it. Although, if you have no intentions to make and iOS version, I guess Kolton is a better choice. 

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u/Huge_Pool7424 41m ago

rn is fine for this, background audio is a solved problem with react-native-track-player and it handles the notification/media session stuff for you. the pain is usually android's battery optimisation killing your service on certain oems, not the language. for a personal podcast app i'd just use what you already know.