Lessons Learned from React Native at Airbnb
summary
Airbnb adopts React Native to ship quickly then reverses course after two years. The company builds 220 screens totalling 80,000 lines of product code plus 40k lines of JS infra, with ~95% files running unchanged on both platforms, but the effort consumes only 15% of mobile engineering and requires two full‑time infra engineers. Pain points include a persistent white‑screen bug tied to Fresco initialization, a painful React 16 upgrade, Redux serialization limits, and hiring friction. Airbnb then rolls out Mavericks; the Mavericks pilot 14 engineers report rapid adoption and large code reductions.
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chapters (9)
- 0:00Introduction and talk overview
- 1:33Why Airbnb adopted React Native
- 8:30Organizational challenges of crossplatform
- 15:13Day-to-day technical hurdles
- 21:56Community and open source limitations
- 27:12Impact on hiring and team structure
- 30:27Sunsetting React Native and lessons learned
- 34:25Introducing Mavericks framework
- 41:46Q&A and closing remarks
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