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Five years of React Native at Shopify

(shopify.engineering)
324 points onnnon | 1 comments | 13 Jan 25 22:08 UTC | HN request time: 0s | 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. jeswin ◴[17 Jan 25 08:07 UTC] No.42735167[source]▶
> I just hope that people choose targets closer to 100ms.

Why? If it's about the phone burning battery for 500ms, it probably isn't doing that - it's just waiting for data to arrive. And even when it's rendering, it's probably not burning battery like say Uber (with which you can feel the battery melt in your hands).

But that's not why I am commenting. I am writing because so many commentors are saying that 500ms is bad. Why is 500ms bad, as long as the UI is not freezing or blanking out?

Why not lower expectations, and wait for half a second? Of course, there are apps for which 500ms is unacceptable - but this doesn't seem to be one of them.