Transition to React Native

The article specifically mentions that they spent a lot of time interviewing AirBnB about their experience and links to the same post.

"If you’ve read Airbnb’s excellent Sunsetting React Native article, these challenges may sound familiar. We spent many hours speaking with engineers from Airbnb and trying to learn from their experiences. We’re grateful to the team for sharing the details of their journey, as the information was invaluable in deciding the best path for Coinbase. One of our key takeaways was that the brownfield approach seemed to be core to many of the challenges they faced. While the idea of incrementally migrating is at first glance appealing — leveraging the benefits of React native for new features without the upfront cost of a full rewrite — it introduces significant technical and cultural migration risk over the long term."

RN is better from the business point of view. I have noticed that some devs don't like RN, because they can't write native code or they only can write native code to Android/iOS. So they can't do everything and are disappointed.

With regards to UI elements and layouts nothing beats React and Flexbox CSS on mobile. Also, when it works correctly Expo is a pure bliss.

C'mon iOS devs you can't tell you enjoy the byzantine layout model of the native iOS apps and working in xCode.

Some parts of React Native are problematic but creating screens is simple and intuitive.

Having just finished an 8 month Expo RN contract I'm excited to never touch it again. For personal projects keen to see how far I can go with Svelte PWA + Capacitor.

Google + Microsoft should really double-down on PWA apps. I think at one point Microsoft was crawling the web and automatically listing any PWA in their app store. If that became the norm then maybe Apple will make their PWA install UX less deliberately clunky.

Many comments here are comparing this transition to the one Airbnb did a few years back. These two transitions could not be more different.

Coinbase decided to greenfield their new apps, Airbnb (attempted) to brownfield it. I've worked with a number of clients that have gone down the same path that Airbnb did, from a business perspective it makes perfect sense, keep what you have and slowly move over, but the technical reality is this will be a complete dumpster fire and you will probably fail.

When you try to convert a native app to React Native everything that makes React Native wonderful to work with just seems to break. Hot reloading either barely works or not at all, load up times increase exponentially, the app just becomes a pain in the ass to work with because nothing seems to work like it should.

Whenever companies propose this I always shoot down the idea and recommended a rebuild in React Native from the ground up. Doing so will take just as much time as browfielding because when you try to do a native -> react-native conversion it always seems to go south somewhere, either slowness, having to write 3x the code, or other problems.