I work as a mobile app developer for Efteling, the largest theme park in the Netherlands.
Our app is built (partially) in React Native, so I'm up to speed with the community.
In 2020, Shopify made waves when they announced that they would move their
mobile efforts to React Native. Since then, Shopify has grown to be a prolific contributor to the React Native community with projects like
React Native Skia and
Flashlist.
Mustafa Ali reflects five years after their last introduction:
"We’re happy to share that our transition has been quite successful [...] Engineers are able to work across web and mobile, allowing teams to do more with the same number of people and unlocking new growth opportunities."
I also strongly agree with their stance on using native code in combination with React Native:
"100% React Native should be an anti-goal. It is great for building features just once, but is not the right technology for everything. [...] Instead of thinking native or React Native, think native and React Native."
This has been our mentality at Efteling as well — React Native allows us to build features fast, but sometimes you just need the performance. Our map, for example, is just plain-old UIKit on iOS.
