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Devon
@itsme.dev

I led the effort to drop React Native at my org. We were woefully behind on updates for all of our dependencies, and we didn't have the resources to maintain what were essentially two codebases. Instead, we've embraced the PWA, which comes with its own pros and cons 🤷

dan@danabra.mov

i bitch about it a lot but React Native is awesome. if you’re a native engineer you might feel skeptical, but it isn’t a lowest common denominator crossplatform abstraction. rather, i like to think of it as a scripting orchestration layer for platform views (which you can still write). like in games

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Devon
@itsme.dev

Bare RN. We were on .59 and couldn't upgrade without first upgrading React, but we couldn't upgrade React without first upgrading React Router, etc. We managed those migrations over the last 12 months thankfully. I might take another look at modern RN (I like that the bridge is gone)...

Devon
@itsme.dev

But I think the PWA route is serving us well. We only need to implement a new feature once, and it's immediately available to all users. It's also forcing us to consider responsive design for all new work, which, frustratingly, is seemingly still a lot to ask for these days.

Devon
@itsme.dev

The biggest challenge so far has been shipping to the app stores, since some users insist on it. iOS still has inconsistent support for PWAs and wrapping the site in a thin native client has presented some issues, particularly around SSO flows.