Thread by @Eli_White

1/ Yesterday I gave a talk at F8 about what we’ve been working on for React Native, and some of what to expect in the future. You should watch the video, but I also want to share some of the details here.
developers.facebook.com/videos/2019/mo… 👇

2/ There are a ton of products from Facebook using React Native, here is a spattering: Ads Manager, Oculus Companion, Marketplace, Dating, Jobs, Profile, Settings, Blood Donations, Crisis Response, and many more.

3/ We spent 2017-18 focused on helping the biggest product built with React Native, Marketplace. In the short amount of time Marketplace has been around it has grown to be used by 1 in 3 people in the US!

4/ While React Native has helped Marketplace grow, 2017-18 was rough. Externally, Airbnb stopped using RN and that caused ripples in the community. Internally, there were concerns about the quality and performance of Marketplace.

5/ We collaborated with MP to improve quality and add delight to the product. At this point, MP is one of the highest quality products in the FB app! We learned three lessons to help teams build high quality products with React Native:

6/ Have people on your team who know users’ expectations of the native platform. The bar when building for Native is much higher than when building for Web. Users expect the bar of native.

7/ High quality products aren’t free, regardless of the tech you build with. Put in the time to polish. For inspiration of what can be done with React Native, check out this great video series from @wcandillon m.youtube.com/playlist?list=…

8/ You don’t have to use JS for everything. Use native when it makes sense. This is a big benefit of RN! Having people on your team who are familiar and comfortable writing native code is a super power for your company!

9/ Marketplace performance was a big challenge as well, especially on mid-end Android devices. We cut MP startup time by more than 50% over the last year with more improvements on the way! The biggest improvements are being built into RN and will be coming to the community!

10/ We have the confidence that we can build the high quality and performant apps that FB needs with React Native. This confidence has let us invest in bigger bets, like rethinking the core of React Native.

11/ We are rewriting the core of RN with cross platform C++ to unlock some exciting new capabilities and improved performance. Check out @nparashuram talk from React Conf 2018 for more details.

12/ The React Native community has been thriving! React Native has had the second highest number of unique contributors on *all of GitHub*. In 2018, RN had >10,000 unique contributors!

13/ We’ve been slow to merge PRs over the years. We've been working on this and been merging significantly more. As we did this the community started sending us even more PRs. We went from 3/day to 8/day. In the last couple months we closed over 600 PRs!

14/ Story time. We set an internal goal to get to 50 open PRs by the end of the half (from 280). At one point we were at 60 open, with 75 days left in the half. We had to close 10 a day to get to 50 by the end of the half! Crazy.

15/ Expo now supports writing a single React Native app and deploying it to Android, iOS, and Web. This has been one of the biggest things we've heard people want! blog.expo.io/expo-cli-and-s…

16/ Microsoft supports and uses React Native for Windows, enabling people to use their expertise and codebase to render to MS's Universal Windows Platform. Check out Microsoft Build next week to hear them talk about that more! mybuild.techcommunity.microsoft.com/sessions/77321

17/ Oculus uses React Native for many of their VR apps, one of which is Oculus Venues. I love this hype video showing what they are building with React Native for VR:

18/ 2018-19 has been great for React Native at Facebook. We are building more with it than ever, and the experiences are faster, and more polished. We are really excited to continue working on our architectural improvements and renewed collaboration with the community.

19/ To everyone who is a part of the React Native community, thanks for making the framework what it is. We couldn't have gotten this far without you. 2019 has some great things in store for React Native. We can't wait to share them with you!

20/ If you'll be at F8 tomorrow, come by the open source booth to talk to us. Our team is also doing a Q&A on Reactiflux on May 9th! Come chat with us then! reactiflux.com/schedule
/thread

Also, this was my first conference talk! 💁‍♀️ This was so much fun getting to share our work with everyone. And yes, my shirt is one of a kind, hand made the night before, inspired by one of @GantLaborde's creations!