They, like most companies would, decided that getting it out to market quickly was more important than delaying a half or full year to "get the engineering right". But that's some kind of logical fallacy, because engineering doesn't mean "designing beautiful things", engineering means understanding both the theory and the practice, and making tradeoffs so that you get something that meets a variety of needs.

That's what I see technical debt as. A lot of people think "technical debt" is just bad decisions that accrue over time, but you can also get into debt by taking out a loan -- with interest. I got into debt when I bought my house. Your city probably used debt to build new schools. Governments use debt to fund, well, the whole country. Facebook took out debt to move faster. And then they had to pay it back with interest, just like my mortgage and those municipal bonds that funded the schools and the treasury notes that trade our foreign debt. Fortunately they paid it back by further developing react native, and they're still pushing.

I think the Facebook engineering team is good -- they simply wouldn't survive if they weren't, and they're doing fine. I don't think they fucked anything up. I think they were conscious of the loan they were taking out, and had a repayment plan in place. So in that sense they did the responsible thing, and took out a loan for the right reasons. It worked out well for them.

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I'm very interested to see where react native goes. I think Microsoft will see an opportunity to push against Apple, because people are falling out of love with Macs and are starting to like the Surface. And if the Surface starts selling, the Phone would too... except that MS has an ecosystem problem. There aren't many developers targeting Windows Mobile, and there's not a ton of expertise there as compared to Android or iOS. By backing React Native, they can get developers onto Windows platforms faster, which means the ecosystem can keep pace with the market if they can keep showing quality hardware especially for power users and professionals. So we may see some MS+FB friendship in the near future.