>and Airbnb abandoning it clearly shows that their engineering culture is solid and not driven by cargo cult engineers chasing the latest fad.

Depends on what they pick next (and why they picked RN before in the first place?), but as a standalone decision it's not enough to "clearly show" anything of the sort.

I’m not sure about that. The ability to identify and accept a hard problem, and then do something about it, speaks of good management in their engineering department.

We just know that they changed toolkits. Not whether they did it to adopt a better one, out of some new fad, with valid reasons, etc...

Author of the Airbnb blog post here. Airbnb is fully invested in 100% native right now.

Agreed, it was a (probably too subtle) retort to the idea that them abandoning it clearly meant they’re a dysfunctional mess.

I use the Airbnb app a lot and have done so for years and there is nothing terribly advanced or unusual going on. It may have been a cargo cult decision to layer RN into whatever they had beforehand, but if so that increases the chance that evicting it was also a cargo cult decision.

Read the blog posts, they had no approach to app-side state and it was essentially a battle between sub teams to see who could make their own ad hoc approach to state “win” organizationally and force other teams to deal with it when data sharing.

Sounds like a nightmare both from a cultural and engineering perspective. It made it so the only way to get a unified engineering perspective was a political “purge” of RN adherents.

Discord uses React Native, and they only have two developers on their iOS app. Millions of users, impressive app with high performance...two devs.

> Millions of users, impressive app with high performance

No offense to the Discord iOS developers, but their apps is neither “high performance” nor impressive. It’s outright janky at times.

And their iOS app is saddled with loads unresolved UI/UX issues that have been around for years, the iPad version is heavily unoptimised, and it lags behind the desktop/web versions by miles.

The Android version suffers the same but moreso.

I haven’t used their app, but scaling an app isn’t actually that difficult if the backend can handle it. I don’t think that their use of RN is relevant here unless you think there’s no way that a native iOS app of similar complexity couldn’t be built by two devs? But then you’d have to explain all the counterexamples, or even where a solo dev builds an app that goes viral and gets millions of users...

"Scaling" an app doesn't simply mean being able to use it on many devices (hence, "if the backend can handle it"). It also can mean you're able to be productive when adding new features to the application.

I specifically was referring to scaling to millions of users. I’m a solo app dev consultant and some of the apps I’ve worked on have had big spikes of users. No big deal.

It’s kind of like saying your frontend framework is awesome because it scales to millions of users. Well yeah, they’re all running it on their own machines, so assuming you can deliver the code to them and the backend can handle it, you could scale to quadrillions of users.

Yeah but the more people that use your app the more tested it gets. The more gnarly edge cases crop up, the bigger the impact if you accidentally ship buggy features, etc. Scale means even your front end has to live up to a higher quality bar. And given that app store downloads are driven by reviews, it's even more critical to avoid bad performance than on the web.

That’s true, and numerous people in this thread report that their app is nothing to be proud of.

"airbnb abandoning it shows it's bad, but other companies using it successfully doesn't sbow it's good!"

Abandoning something takes more work than using it, since it adds the cost of a rewrite. If Airbnb adopted framework X that wouldn't make me confident in framework X -- they haven't even used it yet! If they used it for a long time that would increase my confidence in X (in the absence of evidence to the contrary). But if everyone else started abandoning X I'd take Airbnb's experience with a grain of salt. I get that Discord is able to do well with it, but that doesn't mean everyone is able to do well with it depending on their needs. And who knows, maybe Discord is having just enough trouble that it hurts but too little to switch.

They give it rave reviews: https://blog.discordapp.com/why-discord-is-sticking-with-rea...

I was making a tongue in cheek retort about it “clearly” meaning that, since person I was responding to said it clearly meant they were dysfunctional. Probably could have made it more explicit.

I do think that scaling an app to millions of users says basically nothing on its own about the app framework / code quality itself. You’re scaling across as many devices as you have users. There’s no challenge at all there on the mobile dev side.

React and react native is a fantastic design and a great project. It has been so successful that it is still having some growing pains.

It's certainly possible for both RN and AirBnB's internal organization to not be great.

They also started making enough money that the cost of two native development teams isn't a problem.