We're building a chat app in RN. Last I checked, the RN components do not support the functionality that you mention out of the box.
We are using a fork of GiftedChat which has generally been a positive but not stellar experience (https://github.com/FaridSafi/react-native-gifted-chat). I understand includes some fairly clever (perhaps hacky?) and extensive changes on top of RN's components to mimic the interactions we generally expect in a chat UI. It's been performant for the most part but is quite opinionated.
I would love to know if there's a better, more modular solution out there.
We're also using a fork of gifted chat; pretty much use it for the layout measuring and the inverted scroll view. Hoping to move to FlatList at some point!
The main issue is infinite scrolling by scrolling upward.
The user scrolls to the top, we make a note of the current top comment, load the next set of results, add them to the page.
At this point, the scrollbar is still at the top, so we need to manually scroll down to the previous top comment.
It can be a little jumpy. It certainly isn't smooth like WhatsApp etc.
Does RN have a list view that deals with this issue out of the box?