161–170 of 259 posts
Great article. I started iOS programming in late 2009 and had solid experience of native mobile programming (iOS/Android) and web frontend/backend (RoR/Node.js/React/Go) before I started to use React Native in late 2016. I totally agree with the auther on what work well and what don't work well about React Native. Sad to see Airbnb sunsetting React Native. In my opinion, 2 of the reasons Airbnb had more and more issu…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Me too. Last time I played with Ionic it was still mostly wrapped webviews though. And Vue-native is actually the worst. It transpiles Vue code into React Native code that then gets sent across the bridge to native apis.
Sorry, have you got any source for the vue-native part? I haven't heard of that and I'm interested.
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.
I'm getting a pretty good React Native app working without understanding any Objective C or Swift underlying stuff. Sometimes you just want a Honda.
Tangential to this, he says Airbnb has 100 mobile devs writing about 80k LoC of app code, 40K LoC of infra, and 220 "screens". We've got an app with about the same "dimensions", developed in a similar timeframe, with some very complex financial business logic and 2 developers working on it... what on Earth do their devs spend their time on? Is their engineering organization really _that_ inefficient?
"For reference, we have about 10x the amount of code and 4x the number of screens on each native platform". So the amount of code and the complexity is substantially more difficult than you describe. You probably also don't have as rigorous AB testing, logging, internationalization, contributions to open source, etc.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You are getting your users a pretty bad experience because you are lazy and only think about yourself. Users want Porsches, and they deserve them.
Users may want Porsches, but only a few are actually ready to pay for them.
Tangential to this, he says Airbnb has 100 mobile devs writing about 80k LoC of app code, 40K LoC of infra, and 220 "screens". We've got an app with about the same "dimensions", developed in a similar timeframe, with some very complex financial business logic and 2 developers working on it... what on Earth do their devs spend their time on? Is their engineering organization really _that_ inefficient?
"For reference, we have about 10x the amount of code and 4x the number of screens on each native platform". So the amount of code and the complexity is substantially more difficult than you describe. You probably also don't have as rigorous AB testing, logging, internationalization, contributions to open source, etc.
On the other hand last year I spent two weeks working on a project for which I was borrowed from another one - they had a total of 120k LOC(Java, TypeScript), twenty people and at least the front-end was a dumpster fire.
I guess people don't scale well.
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.
Also don't underestimate a possibility to update app without those pesky moderators. It's awesome, push button and all users are updated.
I’ve never seen anyone do a battery impact analysis of React Native. I wonder why? Person sally, I don’t want to use products where the developer prioritizes their problems over my experiencs but YMMV. Some will argue that an Electron dumpster fire is superior to nothing. I consider that debatable.
I am still waiting for tide to turn and for times when users mattered to come back. Not sure if it ever will.
Modern day software applications are far more accessible and usable on average than those of the 90s and 00s. And that's the metric that actually matters. More people are able to do more things with software.
Tangential to this, he says Airbnb has 100 mobile devs writing about 80k LoC of app code, 40K LoC of infra, and 220 "screens". We've got an app with about the same "dimensions", developed in a similar timeframe, with some very complex financial business logic and 2 developers working on it... what on Earth do their devs spend their time on? Is their engineering organization really _that_ inefficient?
It sounds like in total they have nearly 1m lines and 800 "screens". Between 100 devs that sounds about right.
For comparison, Uber have 400 devs working on 3m lines across iOS and Android.
"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 Elm architecture is so simple you could write the API on a business card, and it fundamentally does the same thing, and solves the same problem. There's almost no accidental complexity, only essential complexity.
Redux on the other hand feels like there's so much accidental complexity, but it's not even obvious, it's masquerading as essential complexity.