I don't think Airbnb has ever been "completely going all-in on React Native" or "completely dropping React Native", but people always seem to want it to be one or the other. The truth is it's almost always something in the middle.

This just isn't true. Airbnb is actively using React Native a lot and has not "stopped using it seriously". I'm not sure where you got this impression. Some people responding to this are mentioning the transition of the potential native-navigation library to react-community. This is a library that we never actually used in production, though the plan was to move off of our internal library to this one shortly after open sourcing it. Priorities shifted internally (to other, more pressing react-native related things that aren't OSS), and we have not yet been able to do that. Since the community really wanted to work on the library despite us not actively maintaining it, transitioning it to react-community seemed like a better thing to do than further fragment the community by having people fork it. I'm still hopeful that we will be able to migrate to it in the future.

Source: I am the tech lead of React Native infrastructure at Airbnb and the primary author of native-navigation.

Where does AirBnB actually use ReactNative, and where is it purely native? I was in the understanding the move to ReactNative was not going "the way you preferred".

I can imagine there are some roadblocks using it everywhere. Or some hesitation from Native Developers.

For me also: Using JavaScript as a language run inside a interpreter inside my app doesn't seem like a smart move. Also native like navigation, activity lifecycle, animation etc are probably hard to get right with React Native.

A lot of people when they first learn about this project have a hard time understanding how it would be useful - so you're not alone!

I tweeted ([0]) about this briefly and thought I'd copy here for the benefit of readers in this thread:

> the wild thing about react-sketchapp is that we can now bootstrap designs with the actual code that powers the product we are designing

> it took me a little while to realize the paradigm shift. we normally think of the code / implementation as the end of the process

> this allows us to use production code not only for our production clients, but also for starting the next iteration

> react being decoupled from the underlying UI implementation unlocks a lot of possibilities. this is just one.

> we are starting to view our react components for our design language as not just an implementation, but as the specification itself

  [0]: https://twitter.com/intelligibabble/status/856941689029640192

This is exactly what I'm doing with Semantic UI React. I'm prototyping in React, and building my own visual language on top of the visual language of Semantic UI. I see how I could instead render my components to Sketch instead (if a really great Sketch file with all the Semantic UI components existed).

Thanks!!!

(Note that you can do this _already_ with bodymovin on the web if you want to)

Thank you for porting this to the web. Right now we use a combination of react-motion, GSAP, D3 interpolation and other dark magic. A strong contender in this space is most welcome, especially if it's at a higher abstraction level.

I'm very interested in building the proper hooks natively to allow for usage with `useNativeDriver: true`. We are perfectly situated for this too, considering the author of the iOS side was also the engineer who introduced offloaded animations to React Native on the iOS side!

(Source: I made the Lottie RN bindings, and work on RN at Airbnb)

Various flows in the Airbnb app are built with React Native. Our recently launched "Experiences" platform is built mostly with React Native, and there are many flows in the app that are built with React Native. Overall it's probably about 10-20% of the app right now. The decision to use or not use React Native for a new feature is a function of what the team building the feature is familiar with, and whether or not we think we can deliver a good user experience with the technology or not. The answers to those questions are quickly evolving though as we build up more infrastructure around React Native, and as the familiarity with the platform grows.

> What has been your experience?

Generally positive, but the difficulty of integrating React Native into an existing mobile app with large existing native code bases should not be understated. It's not plug and play. I'm giving a talk about this in detail at React Conf in March. Make sure to check it out!

> If you were starting a mobile company now, would you start with RN ?

Yes.

Keep in mind that I was the main proponent of React Native being experimented with and adopted at Airbnb. As a result, I have some bias and other people at Airbnb might have different feelings / experiences.