Comment by secondo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by secondo | Hacker News Reader

Arguably the biggest concern with React Native is that it is controlled by a single entity, Facebook, and that they are not one of the leading mobile platforms who from a business perspective have strong incentives to ensure the future of their respective app eco systems.

Facebook's incentives with React Native are somewhat unclear. This is a big, yet often unspoken, reason companies are vary of depending on React Native for their mobile stacks. With more large companies such as Microsoft, and now Shopify getting behind React Native those incentives will have to please a larger group and should become much more aligned with mobile developer communities at large - and not just Facebook's desires.

If Shopify manages to play an active role in the development of React Native and expand the project beyond the sole control of Facebook then React Native will become a much more viable option for companies who for political reasons have refrained from using the technology.

It is no longer the case that Facebook is the only major contributor to React Native. Facebook and Microsoft now just started formalising their collaboration on the project with monthly(ish) meetings[0]. Other large companies like Twitter are using React Native Web (different than ReactJS) for their main progressive web app[1].

Other large companies using React Native are:

- JD.com

- Skype

- Uber

- Tesla

- Discord

You do have a point about _control_ of the React Native project though. That's still all with Facebook. The Github repo is currently setup as a mirror of part of the internal Facebook monorepo. Therefore, all pull requests need to be merged by a Facebook employee before it becomes part of "core". This is enough of a barrier that "non-core" part of React Native were split out so they could be managed and released independently[2]. It is also true that while other major companies are _using_ React Native, they might not be actively contributing.

It would be good if Facebook put some proper structure around React Native as an open source project, however, for now the project is running along fine.

[0] https://github.com/react-native-community/discussions-and-pr... [1] https://mobile.twitter.com/ [2] https://github.com/facebook/react-native/issues/23313

edited: not sure how to make this list correctly formatted

Microsoft should be on that list as well.

I missed it off as I mentioned them in the paragraph above. They seem to be investing more and more into React Native with support for Windows and using it in Office.

It is a bit more than that.

They are also supporting React Native for macOS, and most of their teams that are in the C++ side of "C++ vs .NET" eternal politics seem to want to go with React Native for the managed layer.

>>> Facebook's incentives with React Native are somewhat unclear

I always figured this conversation happened:

1: "We have all these engineers who write javascript but users are switching to native apps. what do we do?"

2: "We could retrain them all."

1: "That would be expensive and time consuming."

2: "We could fire them all."

1: "Also expensive and time consuming."

2: "Wait, what if we made it so you could write native apps in javascript?"

1: "Great idea. Which version of Electron should we use?"

React is also controlled by Facebook, and yet is one of the most popular Javascript frameworks. I don't see how React Native would be any different.

It's open source. If you don't like the direction, fork it and do something new with the project.

It is interesting that React's detractors have seemingly abandoned technical arguments, and now it's all about how evil Facebook is. A while back, the argument was about how the license for React was scary and evil and they would steal all your patents, but they changed the license. So now I guess it has to be just FB = evil

The second/third paragraphs of your comment could be find/replaced Shopify for Airbnb from 2-3 years ago and fit right in.

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