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React Native at Airbnb

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Re: React Native at Airbnb

#61

Post by gpeal »

philipwhiuk wrote: post #55
faitswulff wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Re: React Native at Airbnb

#62

Post by tspike »

danabramov wrote: post #33
eysquared wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The common thread I see is that mixing native and react-native is hard. Doing so while working across organizations that may or may not use react-native is doubly so. Sometimes this boils down to the technology, knowledge, and the engineering systems needed to support both but I've also found native developers tend to strongly dislike react-native and lobby against whenever they can. For me, I'm using it to successfu…

>The common thread I see is that mixing native and react-native is hard. We've experienced some of the difficulties in this area at Facebook as well. If you're curious, making native JS integration more seamless is a big motivation for the ongoing architectural revamp that we've recently posted about: http://facebook.github.io/react-native/blog/2018/06/14/state... It's a shame we weren't fast enough to help Airbnb in…

Any plans to fix all of the build warnings RN produces for native devs?

Re: React Native at Airbnb

#63

Post by pbreit »

pjmlp wrote: post #10

Yet another company discovers what many of us did ages ago with multi-platform frameworks. Additional layers not supported by platform owners, mean extra debugging efforts tracking down which layer is responsible, catching up with native SDK features, need to be an expert at both layers, lack of integration with native debugging tools... But business always wants the Ferrari solution at the cost of a Fiat panda.

“business always wants the Ferrari solution at the cost of a Fiat panda“

Isn’t that the promise of computers and technology? What would you suggest that business want?

Re: React Native at Airbnb

#64

Post by samfisher83 »

If you are a small startup using react native makes sense. If you are a billion dollar company why not just have a team for each platform. Or better yet have have 2 teams for each and let them compete for whose product gets shipped.

Re: React Native at Airbnb

#65

Post by melvinram »

samfisher83 wrote: post #64

If you are a small startup using react native makes sense. If you are a billion dollar company why not just have a team for each platform. Or better yet have have 2 teams for each and let them compete for whose product gets shipped.

Resources, even at a semi-large company, are finite. Teams have limited head counts and usually an ever increasing list of asks from Product team. Being efficient is not optional.

Re: React Native at Airbnb

#66

Post by mephitix »

eysquared wrote: post #22
onedev wrote: post #3

Others 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

The common thread I see is that mixing native and react-native is hard. Doing so while working across organizations that may or may not use react-native is doubly so. Sometimes this boils down to the technology, knowledge, and the engineering systems needed to support both but I've also found native developers tend to strongly dislike react-native and lobby against whenever they can. For me, I'm using it to successfu…

I invested a lot into a full React webapp - it would be great to share some of that code with mobile apps. I have an iOS background but was intending to make a RN app so that I could share the bulk of the React webapp code and get Android support as well.

I have separation of container components and presentational SFCs so I’m thinking I could easily re-implement UI layers in RN if I wanted to without sacrificing the shared code. Do you think this is a reasonable approach? Or should I ditch RN completely and build native...?

It would be nice if there was a way I could pull that shared JS logic (which really doesn’t have much dependencies) into mostly-native apps without having to adopt RN... maybe I could just repurpose the JS bridge and be aware of its limitations (a sync/serialized/batched..)

Re: React Native at Airbnb

#67

Post by maskedSlacker »

MBCook wrote: post #24
kbyatnal wrote: post #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 an…

I had something like that once in native web dev. It turned out that by default when using the debugging pane the browser would disable cache so the issue (whatever it was) disappeared. Close debugging? It broke again. Maddening.

Schrodinger's Bug

Re: React Native at Airbnb

#68

Post by equasar »

Apocryphon wrote: post #41

Really curious as to how Flutter (and Xamarin, NativeScript, Ionic, Vue-based write-once frameworks, etc.) can overcome the difficulties expressed in this piece.

My guess is that Flutter will conquer the majority of data-driven business apps, since it is the closest multi-platform mobile framework to native code.

Re: React Native at Airbnb

#69

Post by samfisher83 »

melvinram wrote: post #65
samfisher83 wrote: post #64

If you are a small startup using react native makes sense. If you are a billion dollar company why not just have a team for each platform. Or better yet have have 2 teams for each and let them compete for whose product gets shipped.

Resources, even at a semi-large company, are finite. Teams have limited head counts and usually an ever increasing list of asks from Product team. Being efficient is not optional.

Lets do a little math. FB has 25k employees. Lets suppose they pay everyone a million buck. That is 25billion. Their gross profits were 35 billion. They can afford to have two teams or 3 teams or 4 teams working on the app. I don't know what Airbnb's numbers are, but I am sure they can afford to have multiple teams.

Re: React Native at Airbnb

#70

Post by rpeden »

kbyatnal wrote: post #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 an…

I ran into a fun one like that many years ago in IE. The JavaScript I had written was failing, but when I opened up the devtools to debug it, it worked.

It turned out that in that version of IE, the console object only existed when the devtools were open. So a stray console.log call was causing an exception because console was undefined. But when I opened the devtools to see what was going on, console existed and so everything ran just fine.

I suppose that's the kind of error that only bites you once. When you know about it, you tend to never make that mistake again. But that first time you run into it can cause a painful few hours of head scratching and attempted debugging.

Funnily enough, I ran into a React Native error like the one described in the article, where something worked only while debugging. My previous experience with the heisenbug in IE led me to immediately dig into what was different in RN with the devtools open vs without them. So in a way, those hours I wasted in IE back in 2010 prevented me from potentially wasting hours debugging RN in 2017.

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