This seems to mostly rephrase things from Airbnbs engineering blog at the time? https://medium.com/airbnb-engineering/react-native-at-airbnb... (part 1 of 5)
Why did Airbnb dump React Native? (2021)
11–20 of 136 posts
Re: Why did Airbnb dump React Native? (2021)
#12TL;DR:
* React Native caused problems for AirBnB because they needed more complete and efficient support for native geolocation/mapping features than RN provides
* More generally, frameworks like RN and Flutter are a good choice if your app doesn't need extensive/precise/efficient access to native platform features and a bad choice if it does
Re: Why did Airbnb dump React Native? (2021)
#13I am not a front end developer, but when reading about these kinds of switches in front end frameworks... isn't that an incredible amount of work? How could it be justified? It must have created some really serious unsolvable problems in order to switch right? You would think it would be easier to improve the existing one instead of switching, but who knows. Either that or the amount of front end code really isn't as…
Probably not “unsolvable” but I imagine not well documented and a million footguns to make RN work in the scenarios described in the article.
This would entail working in a new fork of React Native to add implementations for the underlying Android and iOS SDKs where the native functionality exists. That might include language bindings at multiple levels, e.g. from JS to Java, and potentially Java to C if NDK is required (and that’s just for android)
In my experience, writing those bindings is very bug-prone and user-friendly documentation can be hard to come by.
We wrote some Python extensions in C for a very simple functionality where we wanted native speed. Could definitely see it having been easier to just write the dang program in C, since you had to understand C as well as some fundamentals about how the Python runtime works in C along with its special data types and execution patterns. And if they mainly hire app developers and not interpreter/OS developers that could become entirely untenable
Re: Why did Airbnb dump React Native? (2021)
#14Made a relatively complex React Native app last year, and gained a lot of perspective on it.
I don't think Airbnb made a bad choice at the time they did it. They tried embracing a technology that was at the time half baked. When you are operating at the scale of Airbnb where there are lots of engineering hurdles and a high quality bar, it's challenging to absorb nascent tech.
Since then a couple things have happened:
- Devices have gotten much faster and this has covered up a nice chunk of the performance tax that existed previously
- The framework has gotten more mature and performant
Having said that, there are still a number of rough patches so it really depends on what you need. Shopify, for example, seems to be quite happy with it. But as usual, it depends on what you're making. If you want something with heavy animations, lots of gestures / high touch responsiveness, really fast startup time, etc. - RN might not be the best choice (but still way better than it was before because of lots of great work). If you're creating something that is more on the CRUD side, RN is more than suitable and a great choice.
Re: Why did Airbnb dump React Native? (2021)
#15TL;DR: * React Native caused problems for AirBnB because they needed more complete and efficient support for native geolocation/mapping features than RN provides * More generally, frameworks like RN and Flutter are a good choice if your app doesn't need extensive/precise/efficient access to native platform features and a bad choice if it does
That's accurate to the article but not accurate to modern RN or even most of Airbnb's reasoning when they switched.
With JSI now you can get efficient access to native platform features. Before you were able to bridge pretty much any native feature with a native view or extension, but you were bottlenecked by the JS bridge. Nowadays you can use JSI for anything intensive.
As far as Airbnb, it was more they were trying to mix 80% native views with 20% RN views and they found they were doing more work than pure native. If you do mostly RN though you don't have that problem.
Re: Why did Airbnb dump React Native? (2021)
#16Weird title. The correct English would be "Why did Airbnb dump React Native?". All of the sub-headings have this strange construction as well. Is this 'correct' in some other country and I'm just not aware of it? I was gonna say, it's also weird because the text of the article seems nearly-native quality.. but actually when I went back and looked more closely it's semi-broken English as well. I guess it's in big word…
I don't know what's even considered correct in Indian English, but it tracks with some of the non-standard word ordering I see working with folks from the subcontinent.
Re: Why did Airbnb dump React Native? (2021)
#17Weird title. The correct English would be "Why did Airbnb dump React Native?". All of the sub-headings have this strange construction as well. Is this 'correct' in some other country and I'm just not aware of it? I was gonna say, it's also weird because the text of the article seems nearly-native quality.. but actually when I went back and looked more closely it's semi-broken English as well. I guess it's in big word…
Merriam-Webster shows plenty of examples of usage at the top
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/dump
"He dumped his clothes on the bed. She dumped the contents of her purse on the table. I dumped the old coffee down the drain."
Re: Why did Airbnb dump React Native? (2021)
#18Weird title. The correct English would be "Why did Airbnb dump React Native?". All of the sub-headings have this strange construction as well. Is this 'correct' in some other country and I'm just not aware of it? I was gonna say, it's also weird because the text of the article seems nearly-native quality.. but actually when I went back and looked more closely it's semi-broken English as well. I guess it's in big word…
I often see similar formations in casual translations from other languages. The blog is from "the immigrant programmers", so I guess that'd make sense. I am not a linguist but maybe this particular phenomenon is related to subject-verb inversion in a question sentence clause? Something like the stuff they're talking about on page 5 of this paper, maybe: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/265785678_Embedded_... (over my head)
Like the examples they give include:
> "What this is made from?"
> "Who you have come to see?"
> "I asked him where does he work."
> "I wonder where is he."
They all sound strange to me but are apparently common in some Englishes.
There were many other giveaways in the article that you'd never see in everyday American English usage:
"Oh yes, it happened!" (who says that)
"giant Online American Vacation Rental Business" (...it's just a vacation rental website)
"the, excessive use, of commas, everywhere"
Re: Why did Airbnb dump React Native? (2021)
#19Weird title. The correct English would be "Why did Airbnb dump React Native?". All of the sub-headings have this strange construction as well. Is this 'correct' in some other country and I'm just not aware of it? I was gonna say, it's also weird because the text of the article seems nearly-native quality.. but actually when I went back and looked more closely it's semi-broken English as well. I guess it's in big word…
Looks like the author is Indian or more generally South Asian based on the video and profile picture, and in that English dialect, it's more expected to write statements as questions like the title rather than "Why did Airbnb dump React Native?"
Re: Why did Airbnb dump React Native? (2021)
#20Right near the beginning: > Till the year 2012, Airbnb was just a React website. React wasn't released until 2013.
First thing I noticed as well! I think nowadays younger developers mostly simply equate "web frontend" with "React" subconsciously. :)
Poor things, they missed the glorious Macromedia Flash days...