tl;dr:
> 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.
React Native at Airbnb
11–20 of 259 posts
Re: React Native at Airbnb
#12While i don't have much experience in RN, but have a decade of mobile native development (android + iOS) and two years of React.
The whole 10 years there were people that think that they can just get "web" technology and speedup mobile development.
Almost always this companies had no mobile engineers that know how this stuff works. Developers that know that you just can't listen to scroll and update animations by sending messages to background js thread. This just completely wrong on mobile. Most mobile devs spend months to make it fast and easy to use. There are no way to do this in most cases on RN. AirBNB's app is a perfect example of this. Trying to deliver "better" experience they completely kill scrolling performance. Even top level iPhones feels laggy. But yay! We have animations! AirBNB's app is barely usable on two-year-old androids. This is just simply wrong, this is not how you can achieve good performance and nice animations on such small devices. In most cases this is a kind of art and a lot of testing and tweaking for every device. This can be done by only ONE talented developer per platform per year. Surely AirBNB has resources. Just take specific screen and tweak it to hell. On the other side, react and declarative kind of state is really doesn't work well for non-page oriented apps. Mapping history of navigation via redux store is just an awful and useless idea that helps with nothing. Right now there are still no navigation library.
Every time i tried to start something in React Native i failed since i wasn't able to apply my skills to make it behave fast there are just no easy way to do this.
React Native for sure is a good thing, but it's evolution shaped by web devs that try to reflect their experience from web development, but building a good mobile app is completely different from web one. For example, there are no dom, UI manipulation is not slow, navigation between pages and keeping it's state is not a problem most of the time (there are no real "back" button that you have to handle somehow). UI frameworks are more mature (while have less API than HTML).
Re: React Native at Airbnb
#13Others have been coming out and talking about similar experiences with React Native. This thread made the rounds on Twitter and Medium fairly recently: https://twitter.com/sandofsky/status/1002634185566236679 https://twitter.com/VivekxK/status/1002694526467653632
Coursera also removed it completely.
Re: React Native at Airbnb
#14"Redux is notorious for its boilerplate and has a relatively difficult learning curve. We provided generators for some common templates but it was still one of the most challenging pieces and source of confusion while working with React Native." Interesting to see even Airbnb struggles with Redux
The cognitive overhead of redux ends up being pretty high due to the boilerplate in my opinion. It feels like complexity increases very linearly as project size goes. I've found that MobX translates to a much simpler mental model, though it does have a variety of quirks to deal with that Redux doesn't face (like converting objects to non-observable for test case assertions)
Re: React Native at Airbnb
#15"Redux is notorious for its boilerplate and has a relatively difficult learning curve. We provided generators for some common templates but it was still one of the most challenging pieces and source of confusion while working with React Native." Interesting to see even Airbnb struggles with Redux
As a Redux maintainer, I'd be really interested to know what approaches they used, and what sorts of difficulties they had.
(I'll throw out my obligatory comment that you are always welcome to use as much or as little abstraction as you want on top of Redux, and there's plenty of options available to trim down "boilerplate" depending on your situation.)
Re: React Native at Airbnb
#16"While debugging, React Native attaches to a Chrome Developer Tools instance. This is great because it is a powerful debugger. However, once the debugger is attached, all JavaScript runs within Chrome’s V8 engine. This is fine 99.9% of the time. However, in one instance, we got bit when toLocaleString worked on iOS and but only worked on Android while debugging. It turns out that the Android JSC doesn’t include it and it was silently failing unless you were debugging in which case it was using V8 which does."
Wow, I can't imagine how frustrating this must have been to debug.
Re: React Native at Airbnb
#17"Redux is notorious for its boilerplate and has a relatively difficult learning curve. We provided generators for some common templates but it was still one of the most challenging pieces and source of confusion while working with React Native." Interesting to see even Airbnb struggles with Redux
As a Redux maintainer, I'd be really interested to know what approaches they used, and what sorts of difficulties they had. (I'll throw out my obligatory comment that you are always welcome to use as much or as little abstraction as you want on top of Redux, and there's plenty of options available to trim down "boilerplate" depending on your situation.)
Those libs add some "magic" which is going against the point of Redux (knowing exactly what's going on). Instead of those abstraction libs I like to use the observable pattern with Rx or MobX
Re: React Native at Airbnb
#18While i don't have much experience in RN, but have a decade of mobile native development (android + iOS) and two years of React. The whole 10 years there were people that think that they can just get "web" technology and speedup mobile development. Almost always this companies had no mobile engineers that know how this stuff works. Developers that know that you just can't listen to scroll and update animations by sen…
> Right now there are still no navigation library.
React Navigation and React Native Navigation are both viable options with their own pros and cons. Been using them successfully in different projects.
Re: React Native at Airbnb
#19>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.
Buried lede. Why not just say it outright?
Re: React Native at Airbnb
#20"Redux is notorious for its boilerplate and has a relatively difficult learning curve. We provided generators for some common templates but it was still one of the most challenging pieces and source of confusion while working with React Native." Interesting to see even Airbnb struggles with Redux
As a Redux maintainer, I'd be really interested to know what approaches they used, and what sorts of difficulties they had. (I'll throw out my obligatory comment that you are always welcome to use as much or as little abstraction as you want on top of Redux, and there's plenty of options available to trim down "boilerplate" depending on your situation.)
[deleted]