> Say what you like but this is a very mature move from a young engineering organization.

Airbnb is ten years old at this point, I'm not sure that really counts as young!

I have to agree. It was really interesting that they highlighted that nearly 2/3rds of their engineers would use React Native again. I also assumed that the last part of the blog series was going to be mostly fluff / product announcements, but their efforts in server side rendered native screens and drastic reductions in build time are legitimate takeaways from devs who are used to development cycles at React-Native speeds.

Server side rendered native screens just seem like fancy words for browser to me…

I get that it’ll have native performance and responsiveness, but still maybe just touch up your website and call it a day?

Ah, my mistake, it should say "server-driven," which is more accurate. The view isn't actually rendered on the server, it just seems to be sent over in a declarative format, which the client then renders into a native view.

> sent over in a declarative format

like HTML?

> which the client then renders into a native view.

A WebView?

No

Sorry if the short response seemed rude. No is the answer to both of your questions.

RN isn’t just “HTML in a webview” like PhoneGap or Cordova: elements are actually rendered as native UI components. E.g., a <Text> element becomes a native UILabel on iOS and a TextView on Android.

You have to wonder how many of their 100 engineers are going to dislike having to become iOS/Android devs.

The vast majority of the 100 always have been and are still Android and iOS devs. React Native never made up more than 10-20% of our mobile engineers and many of them came from Android or iOS backgrounds.

How's FB's RN team reacted to Airbnb's decision to move away from RN?

For me, in order of enjoyable front end developer experience it would go iOS > web/js/react > Android.