Five years of React Native at Shopify

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.

Replying to myself for clarification: I did not read their 500ms number as including waiting for a network. It sounded like that's how long it was taking React Native to load local data and draw the screen. If that's not the case, it's a very different story.

From another comment by seemack (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42730348):

> For example, I just recorded myself tapping on a product in the Product list screen and the delay between the pressed state appearing and the first frame of the screen transition animation is more than half a second. The animation itself then takes 300ms which is a generally accepted timeframe for screen animations. But that half second where I'm waiting for the app to respond after I've tapped a given element is painful.