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Five years of React Native at Shopify

(shopify.engineering)
324 points onnnon | 2 comments | 13 Jan 25 22:08 UTC | HN request time: 0.432s | source
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irskep ◴[16 Jan 25 19:48 UTC] No.42729983[source]▶
I agree with most of the other comments here, and it sounds like Shopify made sound tradeoffs for their business. I'm sure the people who use Shopify's apps are able to accomplish the tasks they need to.

But as a user of computers and occasional native mobile app developer, hearing "<500ms screen load times" stated as a win is very disappointing. Having your app burn battery for half a second doing absolutely nothing is bad UX. That kind of latency does have a meaningful effect on productivity for a heavy user.

Besides that, having done a serious evaluation of whether to migrate a pair of native apps supported by multi-person engineering teams to RN, I think this is a very level-headed take on how to make such a migration work in practice. If you're going to take this path, this is the way to do it. I just hope that people choose targets closer to 100ms.

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1. brokencode ◴[17 Jan 25 00:11 UTC] No.42732603[source]▶
Subjectively, I find the Shop app to be quite nice and speedy. It works well enough that I’d never have guessed it is using any kind of cross platform framework.

It’s easy to get caught up on numbers, but at the end of the day the user experience is all that matters. And I very much doubt that performance is a concern for their users.

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2. mirzap ◴[17 Jan 25 08:13 UTC] No.42735197[source]▶
Exactly. Tech people almost always go to the "performance wormhole" arguing about ms and how it could be improved 10x - myself included. But working at a startup the past couple of years, I came to the conclusion that it does not matter to the end users at all. If an app is "nice" and "speedy" as you say, that’s enough. Shopify made a good decision and tradeoffs; it works for them, and I would argue it would work for 90% of other companies as well. You don't really need a native app for most purposes; React Native and Flutter are good enough.