React Native at Airbnb • Hacker News Board

Re: React Native at Airbnb

#181

Post by dxhdr » Wed, Jun 20, 2018, 1:46 PM UTC

danpalmer wrote: post #169

crabl wrote: post #110

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?

That's just the React Native. 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.

3 million lines of front-end mobile code? That is impressive. How many screens does the Uber app have?

Re: React Native at Airbnb

#182

Post by wootie512 » Wed, Jun 20, 2018, 1:49 PM UTC

weka wrote: post #113

Reedx wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you tried Flutter? That's looking promising.

Yeah... but... dart.

Started learning Dart and I like it a lot.

Not sure what the issue is except that it is yet another language to learn.

Google designed it to be easy to learn for other devs. I am mainly only experienced in Java and some Kotlin, and I found Dart easy to pick up.

Re: React Native at Airbnb

#183

Post by dwild » Wed, Jun 20, 2018, 1:54 PM UTC

LeoNatan25 wrote: post #141

RussianCow wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I don't disagree with your premise, "need to be an expert at both layers" is absolutely still true if you build your app natively for each platform (more so, even). At least with a common platform, if nothing else, you can share quite a bit of code, and that alone might make it worth the extra layers.

And “developing” in RN requires you to be an expert in three fields: iOS, Android and the RN layer, which is often buggy. How is that better?

If you are already using React for the web (which I would believe is the biggest reason to use React Native), then the RN layer is pretty much already taken care of in term of expertise.

For the iOS and Android side, that's a constant between the two possibilities.

It's better because now your iOS and Android experts can concentrate much more on what they do best and your React experts can keep working on your UI like they always did.

Re: React Native at Airbnb

#184

Post by Demiurge » Wed, Jun 20, 2018, 2:05 PM UTC

blub wrote: post #163

Demiurge wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The real fun starts when you need to do advanced debugging, the toolkit doesn't cover your use case properly or you hit performance problems you can't solve in the non-native language :)

I'm not sure why it would, I'm not doing anything outside of UI logic and interfacing with web services, so it's almost like all other React.js web development for me. Perhaps that's the sweet spot.

Re: React Native at Airbnb

#185

Post by Demiurge » Wed, Jun 20, 2018, 2:10 PM UTC

LeoNatan25 wrote: post #140

Demiurge wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

First of all, we've had people actually praise the app, second, no one deserves a Porsche. Except Bohr maybe :)

Re: React Native at Airbnb

#186

Post by fs111 » Wed, Jun 20, 2018, 2:15 PM UTC

As a user of AirBnb I would be so happy if they just stopped updating the app. They are making it worse and worse. When I travel and I arrive at an airport, I do not need spiffy animations and "fun things to do" in the city I am in, I need a way to quickly find the address of the place or a way to message the host. Stop with all this experience stuff and give me the facts I need right now

Re: React Native at Airbnb

#187

Post by bamboo_7 » Wed, Jun 20, 2018, 2:15 PM UTC

Demiurge wrote: post #184

blub wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real fun starts when you need to do advanced debugging, the toolkit doesn't cover your use case properly or you hit performance problems you can't solve in the non-native language :)

I'm not sure why it would, I'm not doing anything outside of UI logic and interfacing with web services, so it's almost like all other React.js web development for me. Perhaps that's the sweet spot.

Whoa! Whoa! Are you suggesting that the end experience with a programming framework might depend on the details of your specific project and should not be inferred from general blog posts? That's insane! /s

Re: React Native at Airbnb

#188

Post by spiderfarmer » Wed, Jun 20, 2018, 2:31 PM UTC

fs111 wrote: post #186

As a user of AirBnb I would be so happy if they just stopped updating the app. They are making it worse and worse. When I travel and I arrive at an airport, I do not need spiffy animations and "fun things to do" in the city I am in, I need a way to quickly find the address of the place or a way to message the host. Stop with all this experience stuff and give me the facts I need right now

Hey, they hired so many people. You can't let them just sit there doing nothing.

Re: React Native at Airbnb

#189

Post by maxfurman » Wed, Jun 20, 2018, 2:32 PM UTC

ksec wrote: post #87

What is wrong with TurboLink 5? Not Turbolink 3 or previous version, v5 is very much a total rewrite. Turbolinks 5 allows hybrid Apps that offers most of the benefits without many of the complexity, it is HTML after all. It seems there are sites that uses Rails, including AirBnB. But I have yet to seen a site that uses Turbolink apart from Bassecamp, even Github uses its own version of pjax rather then Turbolink.

My guess is that orgs that want a dynamic frontend are choosing SPAs over turbolinks, and orgs that want to serve static pages aren't bothering to put in the nonzero effort to make turbolinks work.

Re: React Native at Airbnb

#190

Post by bengotow » Wed, Jun 20, 2018, 2:41 PM UTC

xenadu02 wrote: post #143

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.

Eh, I can almost guarantee it has almost no battery impact. JavaScriptCore is fairly fast, business logic doesn't take that long to run (100ms vs 200ms, whatever.), and it all pales in comparison to running GPS or the display for a few seconds. Unless you're playing a game or running some complex algorithm, most of your phone's battery goes to the wifi / cell radio and the display.