Seems like both AirBnB and Udacity made the mistake of not investing enough in the tech. If you keep building out full native features while transitioning a brownfield app to RN, you’re going to have this fragmentation problem.

I’ve converted, (with lots of help of course), a massive brownfield platform product to RN. It took a lot of work, building the right bridging layers, retraining the team, figuring out best practice, etc. We still have a lot of tech debt, but it works!

Pros: Solid cross platform development, easy to teach, easy to get up and running on Xcode/Android Studio (running and working on both in first week on the job), easy to teach the native languages from there, real time bug fixes, fast iteration times on new features. Cons: No 64b on Android, Android peformance lags behind iOS, RN bugs, build process was tough to nail down, no built in navigation support.

We’ve now solved most of the huge RN exclusive problems we had with RN we had when we started out, so at this point I’m not going to be abandoning it anytime soon. There are still problems, but just your average engineering problems, same as you’d get in native development land or any other platform. It’s been about 3 years now, with a 10+ person team now, so maybe I should write it all up somewhere.