I'm not a React user, but I'm a little surprised that they are offering well-performing list-views only now. Is this specific to React Native? And if so, why is there a distinction with React in the browser?

React Native doesn't render UI in a web view as a webpage, instead it uses native components. Some are direct wrappers around their native counterparts, but some components while native are "emulated", eg. ListView is built on top of a native plain view.

Lists (e.g. UITableView on iOS) are one of the most complex UI components on mobile and might be hard to wrap nicely across iOS and Android, so my guess is they just didn't have time to do it right.

nostrademons

Ironically, there's now a backport of React Native back to the web, which renders the stock React Native components using vanilla and .

https://github.com/necolas/react-native-web

If you're doing cross-platform prototyping, it can actually be easier than writing the app in React (or vanilla JS) and then porting to React Native, because the React Native elements are at a slightly higher semantic level of abstraction than stock DOM elements. The markup it generates is pretty atrocious, but if you just want to get something up on the screen, you can work out your design compromises first and then optimize it.