After two years, 220 screens, and 120,000 lines of javascript, we're moving away from React Native at Airbnb. I tried to summarize our experience in a single blog post but that wouldn't do it justice so it turned into five!

None of this would have been possible without the amazing React Native community. We believe in the community and are still excited to see it mature and innovate for years to come.

When building an app from scratch, with no existing codebase, would you still recommend React Native?

It completely depends on what you are trying to build, your team composition, and long-term goals. One of the challenges with RN is that it's very hard to know which is best. RN *may* be better for you but there are risks involved.

I am really curious if you considered @flutterio

1) Flutter wasn't an option when we began to consider this in early 2016. 2) We were able to leverage huge amounts of React expertise and existing infra. 3) Many of the challenges were not RN specific and would be the same in flutter.

It makes sense, thank you for your response.

Very well articulated series of posts....one thing stood out for me and has always been one of my main concerns (about not just ReactNative): "there are instances in which its immaturity shows through and makes something that would be trivial in native very difficult"

i am soo curious about whats your final decision? recently i am been studding whats the best approach for a mobile app, and i always see Native with #java and #swift but this makes it's very complicate because i need to maintain 2 different codes, so at the end this is the best?

Read the series 😄

Thanks Gabriel, That's what i am doing right now

That's surprising. But thank you for the article! Just curious @intelligibabble, is it the reason why you left?

No! The timing sure does lend itself to that theory, though :) In fact, I think the decision to leave would have been a lot easier for me had RN been going a lot better for us.

👏 very well written! Thanks for being so transparent about it.

😮 will Expo be affected by this?

How is Expo related?

Until now I was under the impression that Airbnb supported Expo 😅

is doing some amazing work but we didn't use it in production.

<3

Which technology are you guys moving to? 😐

Read part 5 😁

spoiler .MvRX

😐

Wow! Any chance you're gonna release that new framework to us soon? 😁

Very well written! Thank you for all the information!

I built several RN apps. The startup & deep linking points are a real nightmare for me. I have the same app written in just Android and in RN and the differences in my Pixel 2 are REALLY significant. Splash screen to mitigate it...

“Mitigate” You mean hide in shame.

Very similar experience here. The one thing we did was A/B test an existing screen (rewrite it in RN but add no new features, then deploy 50/50 with existing screen). Helped flesh out both tech and organizational challenges before we invested more heavily into it.

Am I allowed to ask how the a/b experiment went? Just curious!

Can't say much in terms of details, but the ultimate result was that there was a shift from React Native to platform native, same as Airbnb.

Nice post series addressing topics surrounding a technical decision! Insight I got from this is: sometimes the philosophy and ideas behind a framework/language is more valuable than using the framework/language itself.

Very good and balanced writeup of the pros and cons. We have discussed adding React Native to our native stack, so this is really timely and definitely good food for thought and discussion!

Having just left (1mnth in!) 100% native for 100% RN many of ur points already resonate. It took my 10yrs fighting compat, play&build-tools to upgrade to the latest react-native-maps today. The build gradle was very confused. I can get familiar with RN, iOS is platform 3 for me!

Make sure your fiancé is cool with it first but I think I found your wedding vows