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I worked at Airbnb during this time, and basically it came down to the fact that it just didn't make sense to invest in RN. The company already had 50-100 nati
by enra 6y ago
I worked at Airbnb during this time, and basically it came down to the fact that it just didn't make sense to invest in RN.
The company already had 50-100 native engineers already productive and passionate about iOS/Android with internal tooling, large code base and support from Google and Apple (like you could contact Apple when there was a performance problem on Swift and they would sometimes come over to diagnose). Most native engineers didn't want to do React Native and most web developers didn't want to deal with native mobile both on iOS and Android. There was always some edge cases, navigation quirks or performance problems, where in order to fix it, you had to know the platform somewhat well. Most engineers are not that familiar with both iOS, Android and RN. So who would want to do it? Also just to support RN as a platform, you needed 1-2 engineers full-time just keeping it working and resolving issues with the platform (which is not that different from iOS/Android).
To get it fully adopted, you would have to basically restructure the mobile teams, recruit new people, rewrite the code base and tooling to make the switch. RN was experiment to see if teams would be more productive and make sense for the company but it didn't since the company had already invested so much native.
There is also something to be said about building a new app in RN vs trying to build an performant app that has over 10 years of functionality, runs both Guest and Host experience in the same app, is internationalized to 30 languages/locations (each city in the world has their own regulation which affect taxes, what data needs to be collected etc), is run on wide range of devices and runs hundreds A/B tests and gradual feature rollouts. It's classic "I could build X in a weekend" if you only focus on the very common surface level features.
With many frameworks or languages people often love the experience of building a new app. After maintaining the app over years with several developers, platform upgrades etc the feeling might change. I wonder what are largest, most widely used and longest running RN apps out there?