
Facebook moving away from React Native? - mpweiher
https://twitter.com/sandofsky/status/1002637340291018754
======
dfabulich
Sophie Alpert, engineering manager of React at Facebook, has publicly
responded to the report to deny it:

[https://twitter.com/sophiebits/status/1003090742296735744](https://twitter.com/sophiebits/status/1003090742296735744)

"This is not true."

"Blood Donations, Crisis Response, Privacy Shortcuts, Access Your Information,
Wellness Checks are recent projects in the main app mentioned in F8 keynote
that use RN. (The whole Oculus Go mobile app as well.) More to come. RN hasn’t
been used yet in News Feed but that may change."

"I’m not remembering any [teams] that moved away (but there may be some;
dozens of teams have used RN so it’s hard to track them all). But you’ll find
diehard native devs who dislike RN at any medium or large co, including
Facebook."

~~~
illuminati1911
Some manager making that claim in order to protect trust in Facebook's
bleeding edge tech now and in the future doesn't really mean anything. Remains
to be seen.

~~~
chrisco255
Are you kidding me? Random dude on Twitter who's quoting some unknown friend
of a friend who knows someone who heard something gets more credit than the
engineering manager at Facebook? As she said, maybe one or two teams at
Facebook moved away from using it but they're heavily invested in it and
intend on expanding it's usage.

Honestly with all the work going into ReasonML (and Reason React) I wouldn't
be surprised if they came up with a way to do Reason React Native, since
Reason can be compiled to native. But seriously giving credit to this FUD /
fake news on front page of HN is just awful.

------
axemclion
This is incorrect. Here is a response from Tim, who manages the React Native
team -
[https://twitter.com/yungsters/status/989361665752748033](https://twitter.com/yungsters/status/989361665752748033)

Also, here is a list of all the things that our team has been working on with
React Native -
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hvQ8p8q0a0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hvQ8p8q0a0)

~~~
swampthinker
That tweet was a month ago. This change could have been more recent than that.

~~~
dcgudeman
Nothing has changed. Multiple people have directly rebutted him on the twitter
thread. This was FUD plain and simple.

~~~
mobiledever
As someone who manages a team at a large corp that uses react native and ships
a successful project things have _definitely_ changed. It feels like Facebook
has lost interest.

\- the android debugger has been broken for months (it opens to the wrong url,
delta patches also broke source maps). No one at Facebook cares. Do they not
use the debugger?

\- pull requests have stopped being merged. We have FIVE outstanding pull
requests fixing bugs as old as ones ignored by Facebook from 2016. No one will
reply or merge them anymore. We've been told to just create a fork on GitHub
for our project. Apparently that's what every serious RN user does because
Facebook doesn't really care about it anymore.

\- they have a bot who auto closes bugs somewhat randomly. For example an old
bug that Facebook ignored with hundreds of comments gets closed for
"inactivity", but it's not active because folks all complained and now they're
just waiting for someone to fix it.

So it all combines to a situation where the platform is buggy, but you can't
get fixes merged, and filing bugs is largely a waste of time since all it gets
is auto replies from the bot and "me too" responses from others.

We really like RN, it helped us ship fast at first, but Facebook absolutely
seems to have lost interest in it and in having a community around it.

~~~
danabramov
I work on React so I have some context on this.

I’m sorry it’s frustrating but it’s not at all because FB lost interest. In
fact it’s the opposite. We’re making pretty big bets on complex core
architectural improvements to RN, and the team is heads down busy with these
core changes. Unfortunately it does mean that PRs and external contributions
get less attention until those core improvements are done.

If there’s a specific PR that’s blocking you please ping me in DM on Twitter
and I’ll try to get somebody to review it.

Cheers.

~~~
janpieterz
I use RN, interested in these architectural improvements being done. Any link
to an issue or description of these, or a short explanation?

~~~
danabramov
We’ll post more when it’s closer to being production-ready. But TLDR is that
we’re making improvements to the threading model and interop with native code.

------
lucidone
I was a mobile developer and moved away from it towards web development
because of how uncertain the future looks for the tooling.

Investing hundreds of hours into the web framework of the week at least
informs me on javascript/html/css in general. However, with mobile, your
experience with Swift and AutoLayout might be totally irrelevant in the job
market if most businesses want a Cordova or React Native developer, and vice
versa, or the mood of the industry shifts.

Further, from a business POV, what do you do? 3 separate codebases (iOS,
Android, Web) for native, and deal with a nightmare of hiring, maintenance,
and disparate features? 2 separate codebases via hybrid native, and pray the
platform continues to be supported while dealing with shaky native features?
One codebase + extra for a Cordova application, having suboptimal performance
+ UX alongside another hiring nightmare? Or pray Apple decides to be
benevolent, and hitch your app to iOS picking up support for PWAs?

People who complain about churn in front end have never done mobile.

~~~
chuckdries
We recently began work on a mobile app version of our web-based kanban board
application. We ended up spending a week on react native, then switching to
Cordova, which I don't agree with 100% but you're dead on about the ups and
downs. At the end of the day, a 2nd code base, even if its similar to our web
react code base (and even if you can share all your state management code like
we could), is still a 2nd code base.

~~~
ascorbic
React Native was never meant to be "write once, run anywhere", like Java. I've
heard it described as "learn once, write anywhere".

------
ibic
Hmm, what's the problem with this guy? After told on the face that his
statement is unfounded from a much reliable source, he doesn't correct his
statements nor apologize for spreading (seemingly?) false information (If you
dissent, please elaborate with more strong evidences, not some holy
"Sources"), instead, he continues with what appears to be insinuation that he
is more authentic.

Totally NOT COOL.

~~~
underwater
He’s also retweeting uncorroborated replies that agree with him, and ignoring
replies from the team that work on the project telling him he is wrong.

------
dcgudeman
Pretty scant on evidence. I'd like a little more than two tweets from a guy
that seems to have an idealogical slant against non-native development.

------
ascorbic
There's no question that Facebook only uses RN for part of the main Facebook
app. They've been open about the fact that Newsfeed on Android uses Litho
rather than React Native:
[https://github.com/facebook/litho](https://github.com/facebook/litho)

Ironically, this is because they weren't happy with the performance of native
Android components, and that's what React Native uses under the hood.

~~~
argestes
If you have any experience with Litho can you compare it to native Java
Android UIs?

~~~
ascorbic
Afraid not

------
jackewiehose
(one of the twitter comments): > [...] there’s no smoke without fire. Facebook
has a history of just abandoning things.

When I was evaluating which web-technology to use I came to choose between
angular and react. At that time angular2 just popped up and a lot of people
where annoyed by that. One point why I decided for react was because google
has a bad reputation when it comes to keeping things alive.

Is facebook just as bad?

~~~
madeofpalk
I haven't heard of Facebook having a reputation for abruptly shutting
platforms down. On the contrary, I believe its widely accepted that they
handled the shutdown of Parse _very_ gracefully. Year+ notice, with
significant open sourcing and community efforts to maintain continuity.

------
zitterbewegung
Other than an announcement from Facebook that this project is being moved away
from I would rather consult the github page which has updates from the last
two days ago.

If they are moving away it would make more sense that they changed the licence
to BSD on these projects. On the other hand even if they are moving away from
using react native wouldn't the community try to pick it up?

------
zapita
Since this is obviously baseless speculation by a source with no credibility,
and more authoritative sources have denied it, I recommend flagging this story
so that it disappears from the front page as soon as possible.

It's hard to criticize fake news if we fall for it ourselves so easily.

~~~
chrisco255
It was flagged earlier I don't know how it got unflagged.

------
joeblau
I have an ex-coworker who just got a job in Seattle at Facebook and he
mentioned something similar. The reason it came up is because some executives
were trying to push React Native as a solution for a project we're working on.
No engineer thought it was a good idea and we get to build native. After
talking to my buddy, he said that Facebook as moving to some new framework.

~~~
brown9-2
It sounds like the expectation that a Facebook mobile app is built in just one
way or with just one framework is faulty.

------
hesarenu
I have few RN apps on ios/play store. Its very good for cases where you do not
need to access much of device/os functionality. For video, audio other native
functionality you need to hunt for well maintained libs.

Flutter is a very alternate for RN. But when it comes to device functionality
i feel its the same case.

Ultimately i feel its better to write in native swift/kotlin/java.

~~~
sphix0r
I have exactly the same experience(two years of RN).

Be conservative when adding dependencies, rather try to solve it yourself
unless it's very complex and the dependency is well maintained.

Often dependencies will cause you problems when upgrading and many maintainers
don't respect semver(could be a JS-ecosystem issue).

------
r32a_
@Vjeux has denied this....

Also Facebook Marketplace is built with RN

------
zaidf
React Native is the best thing to have happened for native mobile dev.

FB has LOTS of full-time devs working on it. If/when that changes, we can
revisit this tweet. Until then, nothing more than FUD.

------
Findeton
And here I was thinking about what to use for native mobile apps. So what are
the current alternatives to React Native?

~~~
benjaminl
I would seriously consider Xamarin. The tooling with ReSharper is great.
LiveXAML gives you the same instant reload that React Native has.

Xamarin Forms gives you a cross platform UI, but you can use fully native
Fragments/ViewControllers where needed.

~~~
Yuioup
Xamarin is awful. Incredibly slow tooling and useless UI libraries.

------
Apocryphon
This is good news for Flutter?

~~~
qop
Yeah I'm sure Google won't abruptly dump an ecosystem, that's so unlike them.

------
zebraflask
Good. React Native does not work for even the simplest things.

~~~
g_delgado14
Our company has been using RN with real users for just about a year now. And
there really aren't any complaints other than we sometimes can't use some
API's (but we still manage to figure out a solution at the end of the day - to
the satisfaction of our iOS & Android users).

However, we do use Expo[0] to manage some of the rough edges of RN.

[0] - [https://expo.io](https://expo.io)

~~~
zebraflask
You must have had a better experience with it than I did. More power to you.

Seriously, I don't think I need a QR code to make a mobile device work.

~~~
kiliancs
I think you are talking about the dev experience using Expo.

~~~
zebraflask
Yup. Pretty terrible.

~~~
ascorbic
It's not really enough to judge the developer experience of React Native in
general. The whole point of Expo is that is replaces the normal experience.

~~~
zebraflask
That's a fair point and I certainly don't mean to knock devs who enjoy RN. I
found it quite frustrating compared to regular React, which is usually a very
pleasant framework to work with.

