7 ms·

Two years from now, it will be 'why did we decide to move on from React as it was not working out' blog post It is like the circle of life with native vs semi-

Two years from now, it will be 'why did we decide to move on from React as it was not working out' blog post It is like the circle of life with native vs semi-native (which react is), and just html apps. Teams build a fast new version, looks great as it is new code, without much baggage, and over time it gets bloated and people complain that it takes too much to debug/develop on it. Some people in a internal team write a new demo/prototype in a new tech, some director/vp buys in, and the circle of life continuous, in the new tech, and a new blog post is made again. At Spotify, we had few interactions of these, back and forth... like clockwork. Ps. If you are junior engineer reading this, don't pay too much attention of these type of blog posts, as they usually are just PR for internal teams, so someone gets a promotion. Just work on the tech stack that you like working on, and exites you the most. Especially for personal projects. Don't do something because everyone else is doing, but do it because you do enjoy it.

ec109685 5y ago
How utterly dismissive. They rebuilt their apps, increased the number of developers able to contribute to their codebase and improved metrics. That should be praised. Their point about brownfield development was a good one. In my experience the intersection between RN and Native (both code and people) is the biggest impediment.
- ardit33 5y ago
  AirBnb went exactly through this transition and back... Coinbase is just behind by a couple of years. Perhaps Coinbase' engineers, are better, or a different breed from Airbnb' ones, or perhaps React Native has matured more since 2019. Can't give you an answer. Linkedin had the exact iteration years ago. They had one of the first NodeJS Apps, driven mobile apps, and made some glossy block posts, praising it. Then quietly went back to native. Facebook went back and forth with HTML 5 sound the same time, etc.. etc.. It is like seeing the same movie over and over, with just some minor plot twists, they tend to play out the same. Since the Java's Applets promise 'write once, run everywhere', this story instead has been always the 'write once, debug everywhere'. "Sunsetting React Native Due to a variety of technical and organizational issues, we will be sunsetting React Native and putting all of our efforts into making native amazing." https://medium.com/airbnb-engineering/sunsetting-react-native-1868ba28e30a https://medium.com/airbnb-engineering/sunsetting-react-nativ...
  - tshaddox 5y ago
    What then do you think is the “correct state” that they should skip all the experimentation and jump straight to? Personally, I suspect the reason that big teams are experimenting (and finding successes despite some failures and trade offs) is because this is a difficult problem that isn’t solved and requires ongoing creativity and experimentation.
    - ardit33 5y ago
      I am not dismissing React Native, and saying it is a bad technology, (it is pretty good for a certain type of apps) and it can work for some. If you see my end note, "to more junior engineers", don't use React Native in your project because X company is using it, and it must be trendy. Use it only if you do enjoy using it. If you are already good/skilled at building native apps, then you might not need it at all.
  - macando 5y ago
    AirBnB tried to mix their big native codebase with React Native and end up with a Frankenstein.
  - SatvikBeri 5y ago
    The article specifically mentions that they spent a lot of time interviewing AirBnB about their experience and links to the same post. "If you’ve read Airbnb’s excellent Sunsetting React Native article, these challenges may sound familiar. We spent many hours speaking with engineers from Airbnb and trying to learn from their experiences. We’re grateful to the team for sharing the details of their journey, as the information was invaluable in deciding the best path for Coinbase. One of our key takeaways was that the brownfield approach seemed to be core to many of the challenges they faced. While the idea of incrementally migrating is at first glance appealing — leveraging the benefits of React native for new features without the upfront cost of a full rewrite — it introduces significant technical and cultural migration risk over the long term."
- aardvarkr 5y ago
  You’re the one being utterly dismissive with your condescending tone and failure to acknowledge any points that op made. Sounds like they’ve been around long enough to have seen this cycle a few times. Used to be Ruby on Rails was the next coming of Christ.
- EvilEy3 5y ago
  You know what is dismissive? Switching to a lowest common denominator and offer subpar experience. This is what happens when you offer React Natives to users. They dismissed advancements in native development and they'll pay the price the future. It's literally laughable that they decided to transition to half dead tech when Compose and SwiftUI are ramping up.
  - intev 5y ago
    It's literally laughable that you call react native a half dead tech. It's still *the* most actively developed ecosystem for cross platform apps. Don't believe me? See https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2020 https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2020 Moving such a mature company's codebase to bleeding edge tech is one of the stupidest decisions you can make. Is there some price to be paid to be in the future? I'm sure there will be, as there will be with any non native platform. Whether is will be a deal breaker is to be seen.
    - EvilEy3 5y ago
      > It's still the most actively developed ecosystem for cross platform apps. Don't believe me? See https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2020 https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2020 Riiiight, and quickly followed by Xamarin and Cordova. Lol. Of course it is not dead in terms of usage. It is more "dead" for anything complex. I'm looking from a perspective of a best experience, best performance and best integration. If your only reasoning is "we can't afford proper mobile developers" that's probably not the best pitch for a technical folk. Even Facebook, creators of React Native don't use it. > Moving such a mature company's codebase to bleeding edge tech is one of the stupidest decisions you can make. Is there some price to be paid to be in the future? I'm sure there will be, as there will be with any non native platform. Whether is will be a deal breaker is to be seen. Who says about moving now?
      - intev 5y ago
        > Riiiight, and quickly followed by Xamarin and Cordova. Lol. I'm confused - is this meant to be a disbelief of the survey? "quickly followed by"? Are we seeing the same thing? Did you see the %s? It is significantly lower. Of course there are Xamarin and Cordova developers still. Especially in Asia. > Who says about moving now? So wait years and see how everything plays out? So basically you have no solution. Clearly the issues were pressing enough that they needed a more immediate solution. A solution they thought was worth re attempting despite its previous failures.
macando 5y ago
> as they usually are just PR for internal teams, so someone gets a promotion CEO of Shopify praised React Native in January 2020. I guess he was aiming for that postition of Senior CEO there.
dragosmocrii 5y ago
Your comment reminds me of http://boringtechnology.club/ http://boringtechnology.club/ :)
Bellamy 5y ago
RN is better from the business point of view. I have noticed that some devs don't like RN, because they can't write native code or they only can write native code to Android/iOS. So they can't do everything and are disappointed.
xyst 5y ago
The airbnb cycle
raspasov 5y ago
Have you worked with React Native or done other mobile development?
baron816 5y ago
I think it's possible to go native -> RN -> native without the whole being a failure. You may have a product that hasn't gained the traction that it should have because you have to build everything twice and just don't have the engineering resources to support that adequately. You move to RN, build out a whole new suite of features, gain momentum (and lots of revenue), and are then able to switch back to native now that you can afford to hire enough engineers to fully support each team. Might Coinbase be rich enough to support native iOS and Android teams? Probably. I'm not trying to litigate Coinbase's decision.

ec109685 5y ago

How utterly dismissive. They rebuilt their apps, increased the number of developers able to contribute to their codebase and improved metrics. That should be praised. Their point about brownfield development was a good one. In my experience the intersection between RN and Native (both code and people) is the biggest impediment.

ardit33 5y ago
AirBnb went exactly through this transition and back... Coinbase is just behind by a couple of years. Perhaps Coinbase' engineers, are better, or a different breed from Airbnb' ones, or perhaps React Native has matured more since 2019. Can't give you an answer. Linkedin had the exact iteration years ago. They had one of the first NodeJS Apps, driven mobile apps, and made some glossy block posts, praising it. Then quietly went back to native. Facebook went back and forth with HTML 5 sound the same time, etc.. etc.. It is like seeing the same movie over and over, with just some minor plot twists, they tend to play out the same. Since the Java's Applets promise 'write once, run everywhere', this story instead has been always the 'write once, debug everywhere'. "Sunsetting React Native Due to a variety of technical and organizational issues, we will be sunsetting React Native and putting all of our efforts into making native amazing." https://medium.com/airbnb-engineering/sunsetting-react-native-1868ba28e30a https://medium.com/airbnb-engineering/sunsetting-react-nativ...
- tshaddox 5y ago
  What then do you think is the “correct state” that they should skip all the experimentation and jump straight to? Personally, I suspect the reason that big teams are experimenting (and finding successes despite some failures and trade offs) is because this is a difficult problem that isn’t solved and requires ongoing creativity and experimentation.
  - ardit33 5y ago
    I am not dismissing React Native, and saying it is a bad technology, (it is pretty good for a certain type of apps) and it can work for some. If you see my end note, "to more junior engineers", don't use React Native in your project because X company is using it, and it must be trendy. Use it only if you do enjoy using it. If you are already good/skilled at building native apps, then you might not need it at all.
- macando 5y ago
  AirBnB tried to mix their big native codebase with React Native and end up with a Frankenstein.
- SatvikBeri 5y ago
  The article specifically mentions that they spent a lot of time interviewing AirBnB about their experience and links to the same post. "If you’ve read Airbnb’s excellent Sunsetting React Native article, these challenges may sound familiar. We spent many hours speaking with engineers from Airbnb and trying to learn from their experiences. We’re grateful to the team for sharing the details of their journey, as the information was invaluable in deciding the best path for Coinbase. One of our key takeaways was that the brownfield approach seemed to be core to many of the challenges they faced. While the idea of incrementally migrating is at first glance appealing — leveraging the benefits of React native for new features without the upfront cost of a full rewrite — it introduces significant technical and cultural migration risk over the long term."
aardvarkr 5y ago
You’re the one being utterly dismissive with your condescending tone and failure to acknowledge any points that op made. Sounds like they’ve been around long enough to have seen this cycle a few times. Used to be Ruby on Rails was the next coming of Christ.
EvilEy3 5y ago
You know what is dismissive? Switching to a lowest common denominator and offer subpar experience. This is what happens when you offer React Natives to users. They dismissed advancements in native development and they'll pay the price the future. It's literally laughable that they decided to transition to half dead tech when Compose and SwiftUI are ramping up.
- intev 5y ago
  It's literally laughable that you call react native a half dead tech. It's still *the* most actively developed ecosystem for cross platform apps. Don't believe me? See https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2020 https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2020 Moving such a mature company's codebase to bleeding edge tech is one of the stupidest decisions you can make. Is there some price to be paid to be in the future? I'm sure there will be, as there will be with any non native platform. Whether is will be a deal breaker is to be seen.
  - EvilEy3 5y ago
    > It's still the most actively developed ecosystem for cross platform apps. Don't believe me? See https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2020 https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2020 Riiiight, and quickly followed by Xamarin and Cordova. Lol. Of course it is not dead in terms of usage. It is more "dead" for anything complex. I'm looking from a perspective of a best experience, best performance and best integration. If your only reasoning is "we can't afford proper mobile developers" that's probably not the best pitch for a technical folk. Even Facebook, creators of React Native don't use it. > Moving such a mature company's codebase to bleeding edge tech is one of the stupidest decisions you can make. Is there some price to be paid to be in the future? I'm sure there will be, as there will be with any non native platform. Whether is will be a deal breaker is to be seen. Who says about moving now?
    - intev 5y ago
      > Riiiight, and quickly followed by Xamarin and Cordova. Lol. I'm confused - is this meant to be a disbelief of the survey? "quickly followed by"? Are we seeing the same thing? Did you see the %s? It is significantly lower. Of course there are Xamarin and Cordova developers still. Especially in Asia. > Who says about moving now? So wait years and see how everything plays out? So basically you have no solution. Clearly the issues were pressing enough that they needed a more immediate solution. A solution they thought was worth re attempting despite its previous failures.

macando 5y ago

> as they usually are just PR for internal teams, so someone gets a promotion CEO of Shopify praised React Native in January 2020. I guess he was aiming for that postition of Senior CEO there.

dragosmocrii 5y ago

Your comment reminds me of http://boringtechnology.club/ http://boringtechnology.club/ :)

Bellamy 5y ago

RN is better from the business point of view. I have noticed that some devs don't like RN, because they can't write native code or they only can write native code to Android/iOS. So they can't do everything and are disappointed.

xyst 5y ago

The airbnb cycle

raspasov 5y ago

Have you worked with React Native or done other mobile development?

baron816 5y ago

I think it's possible to go native -> RN -> native without the whole being a failure. You may have a product that hasn't gained the traction that it should have because you have to build everything twice and just don't have the engineering resources to support that adequately. You move to RN, build out a whole new suite of features, gain momentum (and lots of revenue), and are then able to switch back to native now that you can afford to hire enough engineers to fully support each team. Might Coinbase be rich enough to support native iOS and Android teams? Probably. I'm not trying to litigate Coinbase's decision.