Airbnb Is Moving Off of React Native (2018)
I’m an engineering manager, and made the call to build a new mobile application for our company in React Native in early 2019. I read this article back then and considered various options before picking RN.<p>I have built apps in native iOS (pre-swift), Android (Java), windows phone (c#), phonegap&#x2F;Cordova&#x2F;ionic capacitor (cross platform web w&#x2F; native plugins), and Xamarin.<p>I did a POC of the app in RN before my team started building it, and I fell in love with it. We moved to the beta with Fast Refresh and the experience of building the app was great. Expo is huge too if you don’t need custom native like we did (we’re building an order processing app for a custom Android scanner).<p>Overall I feel that React is the best tech for building frontends that we have so far, and TypeScript makes JS quite nice.<p>Downsides to RN were the entire package dependency tree getting messed up every time we upgraded (could have been our newness to the platform at play), and the first version of the app that was not built with react best practices was really slow and had a lot of bugs. We had to go through a rearchitecture once we learned how to properly use immutable state, redux, selectors, slices, etc. we use redux toolkit and redux saga, and it has full offline support with automatic resyncing when it reconnects. It is a very slick, high performance app now. I’m not sure we saved any time doing RN because of the learning curve, but now that the team is spooled on this architecture, it’s paying huge dividends as we build electron desktop apps and websites with React as well.