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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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pjc50 ◴[17 Jan 25 13:37 UTC] No.42737372[source]▶
Indeed. The games industry uses immediate mode GUIs and people get upset if they achieve less than 60fps. Having everything be this slow is just a huge failure of coordination on behalf of the industry.

(next mini question: why is it seemingly impossible to make an Android app smaller than 60mb? I'm sure it is possible, but almost all the ones I have from the app store are that size)

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1. tarentel ◴[17 Jan 25 16:57 UTC] No.42740260[source]▶
Can't speak for every app but I've worked on several through the years, a sizeable chunk of all the apps I've worked on were assets. It's possible to hide a lot of it from the app store size if you really wanted to but you'd end up downloading all the assets at some point anyway so there's really no point in putting the extra engineering effort in just to make your app store number look smaller.

This obviously isn't the case for every app and most of the ones I've worked on had a lot of bloat/crap in them as well.