Airbnb Announces It's Ditching React Native and Going Back To Native

In a detailed blog post, Airbnb's engineering team has announced they're sunsetting the use of React Native, citing "a variety of technical and organisational issues", with the development team using it until the end of 2018 and in 2019 reducing support and opting for native.

React Native has been a bit of a hot topic lately, with some companies publicly stating they're moving away from it and rumours that Facebook themselves are not using React Native (their own creation) for many internal applications (which they recently publicly refuted).

It comes at a time when Microsoft is heading in the opposite direction, seemingly doubling-down on React Native. Microsoft has actually rewritten Skype for all platforms using React Native. In a Tweet by Sean Larkin he revealed Office 365 is being rewritten using React Native as is Microsoft Teams and Edge's Debug Protocol.

It is worth acknowledging that Microsoft is building off of their own forks of React Native and apparently Facebook has no interest in merging upstream changes at the moment. A few changes have been made to React Native to meet Microsoft's needs, hopefully, the upcoming rewrite of React Native might introduce some of Microsoft's changes.

As someone who has personally built apps with React Native, I know all too well (as do many other developers) that it's not all sunshine and rainbows. The tooling sucks, the ecosystem is fragmented and unlike that of ReactJS (the view library for web). There are real issues with RN and while it works for some, it won't work for everyone.

_{image from Pixabay}