Interesting - is there an intention to rewrite the whole thing gradually and move away from native? Any reason it's not listed on the React Native site?
I left Facebook almost a year ago so I can't speak about Today.
But back then internal adoption of React Native was definitely accelerating rapidly and it was solving very real organizational and developer experience problems. The original motivation of the project internally was to solve developer experience pains, just like React but for mobile.
- With such a large app (Facebook), the compile cycle was becoming quite slow. RN has no compile cycle.
- You've got 3 teams (web, iOS, Android) per product (eg. Events, Groups, etc) and they don't really communicate or share any product code despite building effectively the same thing.
Take the Mobile Ads Manager app: Now one team (of web engineers) can ship an app on iOS and Android, while sharing 83% of the code between each app, in half the time the project had budgeted for just the iOS pure native app. Not to mention the team constantly loved their jobs because they didn't have to wait 5 minutes for the damn thing to compile every time they made a change.
But back then internal adoption of React Native was definitely accelerating rapidly and it was solving very real organizational and developer experience problems. The original motivation of the project internally was to solve developer experience pains, just like React but for mobile.
- With such a large app (Facebook), the compile cycle was becoming quite slow. RN has no compile cycle.
- You've got 3 teams (web, iOS, Android) per product (eg. Events, Groups, etc) and they don't really communicate or share any product code despite building effectively the same thing.
Take the Mobile Ads Manager app: Now one team (of web engineers) can ship an app on iOS and Android, while sharing 83% of the code between each app, in half the time the project had budgeted for just the iOS pure native app. Not to mention the team constantly loved their jobs because they didn't have to wait 5 minutes for the damn thing to compile every time they made a change.