What is the current state of cross platform mobile app development in big tech?

Senior Software Engineer [SDE 3] at Amazon19 days ago

I have a decade of native Android development experience and about 5 using react-native. I love the idea of cross platform tech and it has served me well in the recent years for various needs - including complex use-cases.

I am also well aware of native mobile folks who are very much against using react-native or flutter (I was one of them before I tried).

I am trying to understand what is the current state of cross platform tech in other companies? Meta, Airbnb, Google, Tesla

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Alex Chiou
•Tech Lead @ Robinhood, Meta, Course Hero
18 days ago
Meta

Overall, mobile cross-platform (React Native/Flutter) is not doing well at Meta. I was part of an effort to rip out all React Native from the Instagram apps, and it was a huge performance boost (we literally made millions from the ad flow improvements). However, I think some stuff is still in React Native like Facebook Marketplace.

That being said, cross platform is actually growing at Meta - It's just server-driven. Meta has a framework called Bloks where engineers can write back-end Python code that then renders UI on the mobile client. Bloks is spreading across the company super fast.

Airbnb

For Airbnb, I know they moved off of React Native to native. They wrote a pretty famous blog post about it here: https://medium.com/airbnb-engineering/sunsetting-react-native-1868ba28e30a

I would be very surprised if they went in reverse.

Other Companies

I don't know much unfortunately, but I do know the following among big companies:

Coinbase went in reverse of Airbnb and went from native to React Native

Chime has always been on React Native
- 0
  Senior Software Engineer [SDE 3] [OP]
  •Amazon
  18 days ago
  Thanks for the answer. Yeah I went through the native vs react-native war 5 years ago when Airbnb pulled out of it.
  
  I am more interested in learning the server driven UI development. Are there any public announcements or blog posts?
- 0
  Alex Chiou
  •Tech Lead @ Robinhood, Meta, Course Hero
  18 days ago
  
  I am more interested in learning the server driven UI development. Are there any public announcements or blog posts?
  
  It looks like Bloks is internal knowledge, haha. I'm sorry Zuck 🙏
  
  I am surprised they haven't written any engineering blog posts about it. I was half-expecting that Meta had already open-sourced it and I missed the announcement.