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There is a difference between mission-critical and critical for the business. For an entity like Snapchat, it is the business. It'd be stupid for them to even

• tomduncalf 7y ago
  Not saying you are wrong at all - building something with highly complex interactions, real time image manipulation etc. such as Snapchat would likely require dropping down to native code for a good part of it - but “maybe sharing some code” isn’t really fair - in my experience, React Native allows you to share the vast majority of code (aside from any native bits, of course). We’ve built a pretty complex and highly visual music learning app for iOS and Android recently, and thanks to the combination of React Native, Unity and JUCE (C++ audio framework), pretty much all the code is shared. Seeing it run on Android with no big changes needed (aside from audio stuff, which is a challenge on Android in general) for the first time was pretty impressive. Even given unlimited resources, I’m not sure I’d choose to go down the 2 native apps route - automatic feature parity across platforms is a pretty killer feature. If you were building something like Snapchat where I guess things like app startup time and performance on budget devices are important, I can see why you’d choose to though.