Go back to a native Android app

DragoCubed
I'm in the beta channel of the Android app and today I got an update that completely changed Discord for Android: it now uses React Native. The Discord website uses React and the iOS app uses React Native. Facebook, the maintainers of React Native, generally gives a lot more love to iOS. And it comes through in the Discord app for Android. All sorts of animations are alien. All sorts of UI paradigms are alien. All sorts of vibrations are alien. Even features are missing. There's no tooltips, certain ripple effects are not round, some items are really dense. Even scrolling isn't the same. I even saw a few places with centred titles! I always commended Discord for going native on Android. Everyone knows it's easy to develop React Native apps. Everyone also knows that React Native apps just don't feel as good as native apps. You made a grave mistake. Discord went from a shining example of an Android app to "good enough". Please revert this decision.
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Comments

17 comments

Date Votes
  • DragoCubed

    There are also multiple places where content goes below my system's navigation bar.

    You can probably fix all of this with some effort but you could also add features to the native Android app with that same effort.

    6
  • DragoCubed
    • Edited

    I'm now also seeing places where the back button isn't respected, such as the submenus of profiles.

    So many companies have gone from React Native to native. It's never been the other way round, except for certain failures such as Skype. Airbnb is a good example. They actually wrote some articles about it. Long story short, it wasn't a good enough experience. 

    Even the Spotify integration is gone. 

    6
  • Inrixia

    I just got the update on my phone too, Immediately noticed because the OLED Dark mode is completely missing making the app look horrible compared to what I'm used to.

    Playing around with the app some many animations feel laggy and horrible, loading content takes significantly longer compared to before (On the order of half a second to multiple seconds) and the overall design feels off like the entire UI is a size larger than before.

    I'm honestly considering switching to the stable version because of how frequently I use discord mobile and I seriously hope either all the issues are fixed, or these changes are not deployed to the non beta.

    9
  • codebyte
    • Edited

    Yeah the new font sizes are incredibly messy, and I've asked via a support ticket about the amoled dark mode (which isn't available now in this app).

    Edit: AMOLED is back but the app is quite buggy

    6
  • Chunky is dead

    It's also worth pointing out that the old native app performed significantly better than the latest update. I had to switch back to the stable version due to the constant lag from the latest beta update, and the device I'm using (Oneplus 5T) isn't particularly old or slow.

    3
  • Inrixia

    I also have switched back, running on a S21 Ultra and was noticing significant lag. 

    2
  • Cistara

    Yes this update needs to be reverted and never make it to production/live. Everything looks soooo much worse/squished. The notifications are horrid. And everything is super choppy and laggy. Instantly left the beta and uninstalled the new version. Quit trying to force this iOS garbage on us. Design apps for their native platforms instead of trying to shoehorn the same thing onto everyone.

    6
  • Yuoaman

    Yeah the new beta looks significantly worse, and the lack of the AMOLED mode means I'll be switching away from the beta so it doesn't look this bad anymore.

     

    2
  • TheMinersMax

    Between notification issues, laggy/clunky UI, and lack of the AMOLED theme, which I've used for over a year at this point and really grown to like better than the others, I don't think switching to react native is a good idea.

    2
  • Jessemburs
    • Edited

    I've been having issues with the app lagging significantly since the most recent beta update (128.8). Typing anything takes ages and if I want to add an emoji, the whole app lags so badly that i end up misclicking on the wrong emoji and I have to go back though the whole lagging mess again to pick out the correct one.

    Also, i just got off my first video call since the update and ran into significant issues. The pickup and hang up tone are ear splittingly loud, even with my phone volume turned as low as it can go. It also appears as though the option to adjust other people's voice volume within the call has vanished. I had my phone volume turned down as low as it would go and the other person was still so loud. Since i couldn't turn the volume down in the call, i had to navigate back all the way out to turn the master output volume down in the app.

    This is the first time I've ever had any significant problems with a beta update. I really hope this update doesn't get pushed out to the rest of the users because it's such a huge downgrade to the previous version of the app. I'm seriously considering leaving the beta so I can have a usable app again. If this update gets pushed out, I may need to find a discord alternative because I find this beta update so unusable.

    Update: I'm still having all of the above issues with the 128.10 & 128.11 beta updates. 

    2
  • Ben
    • Edited

    Discord had made a great choice keeping the Android app native all these years, and I'm sad to see that coming to an end. The new React Native version is not an improvement, and does not feel at home. It is slow, sluggish, and choppy. It does not feel at all native next to my other Android apps. As a developer at a company that ships a cross-platform app, I can appreciate the advantages to having a single codebase when it comes to feature parity. But I can't help but feel that the devs at Discord must know that this new version is worse, not better.

    I sincerely hope that Discord reverses course on this change. Please listen to the community.

    4
  • ggtyler
    • Edited

    Been having issues with this too. Reactions do not work at all if they don't allow you to set new ones in a channel (i.e. in announcements, giveaways or verification.)

    This is the only native version of Discord that's actually feature complete. And the worst thing is, they won't listen to us - I've been on this platform since early 2016 and the only time a suggestion ever worked is with activities (which they then proceeded to delete my post afterwards.)

    They didn't listen to the pleas about the redesign. About message content intents on bots. About the numerous amounts of times people asked for a proper app on Desktop.

    Frankly, I'm sick of it.

    1
  • S_h_a_r_k_93

    Cistara this update needs to be reverted and never make it to production/live

    Unfortunately not only it did make it to production, but it's still terrible!
    I have no idea how this garbage made it past quality checks, it's horrible!

    The performance of the app went from good to worse, it's unacceptable.

    3
  • cekoned957

    So what is the last version before RN? Might as well use just that.

    0
  • Inrixia

    I'm using

    com.discord_124.12_-_Stable-124012_minAPI21(arm64-v8a,armeabi,armeabi-v7a,mips,mips64,x86,x86_64)(nodpi)_apkmirror.com.apk

    1
  • cekoned957

    126.21 (126021) seems to be the last one. And it works really smooth

    1
  • S_h_a_r_k_93
    I used this tutorial on how to revert back to the old native android style app, and I'm sticking to it!
    0

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