lrichardson

Assuming the person you're talking about was me, I'm curious what it was I said that made me seem less enthusiastic? I always try to be as honest as possible in my interviews, and I don't think my enthusiasm has changed much over the last year or two, though I certainly have learned a lot!

I don't think Airbnb has ever been "completely going all-in on React Native" or "completely dropping React Native", but people always seem to want it to be one or the other. The truth is it's almost always something in the middle.

to clarify: we never "switched: to our own navigation library. We built our own from the start, and have never switched.

> the AirBnB team even stopped using it seriously

This just isn't true. Airbnb is actively using React Native a lot and has not "stopped using it seriously". I'm not sure where you got this impression. Some people responding to this are mentioning the transition of the potential native-navigation library to react-community. This is a library that we never actually used in production, though the plan was to move off of our internal library to this one shortly after open sourcing it. Priorities shifted internally (to other, more pressing react-native related things that aren't OSS), and we have not yet been able to do that. Since the community really wanted to work on the library despite us not actively maintaining it, transitioning it to react-community seemed like a better thing to do than further fragment the community by having people fork it. I'm still hopeful that we will be able to migrate to it in the future.

Source: I am the tech lead of React Native infrastructure at Airbnb and the primary author of native-navigation.

Hello, I work at Airbnb and helped Jon with this project a bit.

A lot of people when they first learn about this project have a hard time understanding how it would be useful - so you're not alone!

I tweeted ([0]) about this briefly and thought I'd copy here for the benefit of readers in this thread:

> the wild thing about react-sketchapp is that we can now bootstrap designs with the actual code that powers the product we are designing

> it took me a little while to realize the paradigm shift. we normally think of the code / implementation as the end of the process

> this allows us to use production code not only for our production clients, but also for starting the next iteration

> react being decoupled from the underlying UI implementation unlocks a lot of possibilities. this is just one.

> we are starting to view our react components for our design language as not just an implementation, but as the specification itself

  [0]: https://twitter.com/intelligibabble/status/856941689029640192

Stay tuned. It will work on the web as well :)

(Note that you can do this _already_ with bodymovin on the web if you want to)

I'm not sure what you mean by this? The react-native version does nothing but wrap the ios/android libraries (which are CoreAnimation and Canvas based, respectively)

It doesn't yet, but I hope to work in integrating these two very very soon. We have to figure out what this will look like on Android, as the TransitionCoordinator on iOS doesn't have an exact equivalent on Android.

> What are you building with RN at airbnb?

Various flows in the Airbnb app are built with React Native. Our recently launched "Experiences" platform is built mostly with React Native, and there are many flows in the app that are built with React Native. Overall it's probably about 10-20% of the app right now. The decision to use or not use React Native for a new feature is a function of what the team building the feature is familiar with, and whether or not we think we can deliver a good user experience with the technology or not. The answers to those questions are quickly evolving though as we build up more infrastructure around React Native, and as the familiarity with the platform grows.

> What has been your experience?

Generally positive, but the difficulty of integrating React Native into an existing mobile app with large existing native code bases should not be understated. It's not plug and play. I'm giving a talk about this in detail at React Conf in March. Make sure to check it out!

> If you were starting a mobile company now, would you start with RN ?

Yes.

Keep in mind that I was the main proponent of React Native being experimented with and adopted at Airbnb. As a result, I have some bias and other people at Airbnb might have different feelings / experiences.

I plan on adding a React API for the bodymovin library in addition the react native library. They will likely have identical interfaces.

Great question. Right now playing the animation with the imperative API in React Native will be driven entirely on the main thread, but the declarative API with `Animated` will not be (yet).

I'm very interested in building the proper hooks natively to allow for usage with `useNativeDriver: true`. We are perfectly situated for this too, considering the author of the iOS side was also the engineer who introduced offloaded animations to React Native on the iOS side!

(Source: I made the Lottie RN bindings, and work on RN at Airbnb)

That's a fair point... but I guess the primary point I was making was that it's important for the founders themselves to understand this dynamic. Their interests and the investors' interests are not perfectly aligned.