Inertia for React Native

[joshmanders]

Started off by this thread on X https://x.com/joshmanders/status/1883597614710685762

I haven't looked deep into the internals of Inertia but from my understanding the server side element of Inertia just sends out the SPA setup for your preferred frontend framework to attach to including the metadata for Inertia React to send you to the correct location in the router, etc.

So in theory there shouldn't be much trouble to make a React Native variant that would just deviate a bit by not calling the underlining server (because there isn't one), and instead call an API where you can configure the base url, then just doing typical React code, but importing from @inertiajs/react-native, right?

[RobertBoes]

I don't think it would be realistic to expect Inertia to maintain yet another library, it's proven the current libraries require already a significant amount of time to maintain. With how Inertia works, you could write your own adapter tho.

As for implementation, Inertia is inherently a web/browser protocol, that's how it's designed. It's not tailored for a native app, with native apps you'd want client-side caching, you'd want the ability to even use the app while the user is offline. Inertia is back-end driven, so views wouldn't even load when there's no server connection, as the server decides which view is loaded.

[joshmanders]

It's not tailored for a native app, with native apps you'd want client-side caching, you'd want the ability to even use the app while the user is offline. Inertia is back-end driven, so views wouldn't even load when there's no server connection, as the server decides which view is loaded.

That's subjective. The last few apps I worked on we were not offline at all. To use them a internet connection was required.

And from my limited understanding there will need to be some cooperation with core to make such a thing work, but for the most part a @inertiajs/react-native package would be just the layer between RN and your Inertia app base url and initial data request, then delegate the rest to @inertiajs/react and the client side routing mechanism.