This is very inaccurate in many aspects, not sure if actually anything accurate in this except the fact that Airbnb did use and eventually dumped RN (source: I worked at Airbnb 2015-2019 on the platform team).

As others have linked, Airbnb actually did write a summary about this.

Basically what went down: For years Airbnb had actually pretty strong native mobile engineering both on iOS and Android (some of the best engineers I’ve worked with) there was no issue investing more in to it. The had the resources, platforms were working well.

The main challenge however was that anything the company needed to launch, needed to be built on 3 platforms at the same time (4 if you count tablet). Timelines were often tight which made the overall coordination between the platforms tough.

One the main examples of this was when 2015-2016 team I was part of basically redesigned and rebuilt the mobile apps, and created a design system/component/layout library at the same time for each platform. It was a huge effort.

At the same time, there was one guy basically hacking on React Native and ended he built the whole component system by himself in few weeks, compared to the months it took in native platforms. This was obviously impressive and company decided to experiment if we could use RN more to speed up development. I think the idea was never to fully replace the native platforms or even core flows, but there were lot of random flows and screens in guest and host apps which only minority of the users see.

So 2016-2019 there was a core team working on a RN adoption, and different people and teams used it in different projects. There were some technical issues at times with performance and navigation that got eventually solved.

However where it all came down was there wasn’t that much adoption and there wasn’t clear group who would actually use RN. Mobile engineers didn’t want to write RN code and web engineers didn’t want to build on mobile. RN also requires understanding of the native platforms, and if the point is build both for iOS and Android, then you need to understand both platforms which is a rare skill set.

So in the end it was just more complicated than it was worth.

I think new company/product can build the team and culture around RN will have better success.

I’d still think if it’s the right choice given what you are building. No matter how good you are I think the RN/Flutter apps can be ok it’s really hard to make them feel fully native.