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Comment by Etheryte | Hacker News Reader

While personally I dislike React Native in the strongest terms possible for the number of nigh impossible to debug technical issues it has brought the projects that tried to tame it, there is a really interesting moment happening here. Microsoft is embracing Facebook's cross-platform tools to eventually compete with Google's cross-platform Electron. Microsoft currently relies on Google for the internals of VS Code, Github for Desktop and many more of its popular pieces of kit, and it doesn't seem very happy about it.

My own experience with React Native has been nothing but terrible, but it will be interesting to see how all of this will play out in the long run.

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Fascinating that your experience has been the opposite of mine. Did you do native app development before trying react-native?

My unconventional take is the real gains from react-native come from converting existing native projects, while leaving as much native code intact as possible.

V8, Chromium and Blink are an Open Source projects that Google is one of the main contributors to, but they're not 'Google'.

If Google went away tomorrow, V8, Chromium and Blink would still exist, and Microsoft would be able to use all projects.

Sure they are open source projects, but the majority of dev work is done on Google's dime. Google employs many of the most important people in these projects. Sure the code will still be there if Google gives up, but will anyone have the capacity to step up and maintain them?

Yes. Microsoft would hire them, and already is doing do.

There's plenty of commits to V8 from outside Google. Blink is a fork of a fork of a twenty year old project.

The problem isn't the projects going away, more so that Microsoft has no control over where those projects are headed. If Electron moves in a direction that works well for Google but not so well for Microsoft, they can't do much about it unless they want to pick up maintaining a full fork.

Google doesn't care about Electron, much like they don't care about node.js, despite those projects relying on tech Google contributes to. Whereas Microsoft does care about Electron.

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