[weixiyen]

Instagram is the last group that would have problems hiring iOS and Android developers. I'm almost certain that's not the reason for the switch to React Native.

The main reason to switch is that the user cannot tell the difference for their use case, and they get to iterate faster.

[Bahamut]

I'm not sure if this is still the case, but I remember hearing a year and a half ago or so that the Instagram team was still pretty small then. FB is pretty lean in terms of number of frontend devs - at that time I remember being told the number was ~250 or so, which has probably grown since then.

[hakanito]

Yeah it's certainly not the main reason. Perhaps just a nice side effect, but I don't think it's a negative one