The GP implies that the only reason a company would go with React Native is to make life easier for it's dev's at the expense of performance. That's clearly not true and I believe the GP knows it.
If performance was the only thing that mattered to consumers then performance and optimization would be the only thing Instagram's developers would focus on. Facebook is a public company, it publishes Instagram's engagement, growth and advertisement numbers every quarter. Choosing a technology that hurts those numbers would be a poor decision.
Performance doesn't come for free it often comes at the cost of stability and slower time to market. In the case of React Native versus having separate Native teams it also comes at the cost of synchronizing different product teams and dealing with the bugs that come out of that.
To sum up, if React Native was a poor choice it would reflect in the user engagement/growth numbers and wouldn't last long within a metrics driven public company like Facebook.
So you say that React Native is not just to make life easier for developers, but then go on a rant ... that proves how React Native makes life easier for developers? Otherwise, it is a very big compromise, in regards to UX and performance. UX is not native - it reimplements basic concepts from each OS on its own in JS, which is neither good for UX (it doesn't look or feel right), and performance suffers due to bridge shenanigans, JS VM and shadow view hierarchy (aka shadow DOM).
"So you say that React Native is not just to make life easier for developers, but then go on a rant ... that proves how React Native makes life easier for developers?"
I'm very sorry if my comment came across as a rant, that was not my intent. I actually never made the claim that React Native makes developers lives easier in that comment.
My main point was that raw performance is not the only thing that matters to users. App stability and the time that it takes to get new features to market are also things that users care about, sometimes at the expense of performance.
Facebook/Instagram make product and technology decisions based on metrics. Making life easier for their developers is a secondary concern. If a feature is not moving the engagement numbers in the right direction, it gets cut.
The proof of this is Paper, a beautiful fast native app that was originally meant to the replacement for the main Facebook app. It's numbers sucked, so Facebook cut it.
Paper was never designed to be a Facebook replacement, but a PoC in engagement through UI using Facebook. The released a lot their findings and tools to the OS community as well (Tinder took their animation mechanics). Btw 1 billion DAU would have never agreed to that level of rethinking for the app.
> I think that is willfully missing the point.
How is GP missing the point, when you go on to illustrate the point? Or, is your counter-point to GP that "design is special, so cut us some slack"?