Discord Switching to React Native for Android App

I'm pretty convinced RN is only really a thing because it gives PMs/managers some good promo material about how they lead a team to "switching to a shared cross-platform codebase". They then end up using that to switch jobs/companies before they have to deal with the long-term fallout of making the switch to RN.

My company recently switched both our Android and iOS apps over from native to RN. The RN promoters promised all sorts of benefits about sharing code between platforms and how the performance would be as good as native, and how the UI would look like native, and none of that actually materialized:

- In the end, RN code is only something like 20% of our Android app. They weren't able to just "write once" and run on both.

- Instead of having 2 teams, an iOS and Android, now we have 3 teams, iOS native, Android native, and RN. And the RN team is split between iOS and Android. All sorts of additional complexity now.

- We still need a fully staffed Android specific team for everything that couldn't be done in RN.

- The performance difference vs. a native app is blatantly obvious.

- Now we just have organizational problems as the app has multiple teams/languages involved, different parts of the app are owned by different teams and manager chains, rather than just one team of people that own making a good app. RN teams can dynamically push code changes to production apps and we no longer have deterministic, reproducible builds.

- Now we have morale issues from the discontent from the team members that want nothing to do with RN.

- The UI, even though it's supposed to use native controls, just does not look and feel like native apps, there's so many little things that are strange/different.

- Our codebase is now dependent on a 3rd party platform and on a language that completely differs from how Google says that Android apps should be built. Why wouldn't we just build Android apps the way the Android team says we should? Is there going to be long term support for RN/JS?

It's worth noting that even a cheap, used 3-year-old iPhone 11 [0] is faster in benchmarks than a new flagship Samsung S22 Ultra [1], and the disparity is much larger when comparing flagships of the same generation head-to-head. This is no excuse for slow software, but it does go some way towards explaining the speed of the iOS app.

[0]: https://browser.geekbench.com/ios_devices/iphone-11 [1]: https://browser.geekbench.com/android_devices/samsung-sm-s90...

> as long as it's a real standard already installed and kept up to date on 99% of potential user's systems.

Unfortunately, by far the closest thing we have to this is Google Chrome.

I had to uninstall the discord app for my Core i5 Windows PC because it would randomly peg the CPU at 100% and become mostly unresponsive (several seconds to register keystrokes...). Now it's only a web tab I load when I need to.

I was relying on the Android app for notifications... but if it's now becoming as bad as the Windows and the Web apps, that's going to be an issue. I can't uninstall it from everywhere, not a messaging app.

Counter-anecdote from my company, which also ships a RN app on both platforms:

> The RN promoters promised all sorts of benefits about sharing code between platforms and how the performance would be as good as native, and how the UI would look like native, and none of that actually materialized

We've pretty much seen all of this materialize. Our native apps perform great, look great, feel native. There's a tiny bit of platform-specific code around the edges, mostly for integrations with third party libraries. But 90+% of our code is shared, idiomatic React code, and mostly only the team lead ever has to dig beneath that. The whole team for both apps together is around 10 people, and most of them never have to step outside of JS. They also have an easy time making changes in our React web app (and the web team has an easy time making changes in RN) because the skillsets largely overlap.

> RN teams can dynamically push code changes to production apps and we no longer have deterministic, reproducible builds

Ok- but nothing about RN forces you to use the dynamic code push feature. In fact, we just decided as an org that we wanted to reduce our usage of it. This sounds like an organizational issue.

I have to ask, what kind of app were y'all building? I could see this varying widely based on that. Ours is a fairly straightforward finance app