Every company that I know of that has tried this hybrid approach has walked it back months later. This includes Nextdoor Engineering, AirBnB, and Coursera among others. What’s interesting is that many of the things you guys seem excited about were the exact same things that we at Nextdoor and other companies were excited about too. However, beyond the experiment we did — the investment we made in RN based on the initially very promising signals just did not bear the long term fruits that we were hoping it would (I can go into more detail if necessary, but for the sake of brevity I’ll leave it at this for now).

The companies that seem successful with React Native seem to be the ones that have their entire app in RN and started out the app that way. That’s the scenario where RN seems to provide the most benefits and fulfill its incredibly compelling promise.

I really really hope your team doesn’t go down the same exact *expensive* path that we and many others have gone down only to find the same thing. As I mentioned, it’s an incredibly compelling idea on mobile so I don’t blame your team for experimenting and maybe it will end up being a success in your org. There are several details that I’m missing about your experiment so I’m excited for the series of blog posts!

In any case, thank you for putting your experience out here via these posts. It’s important that we all learn from each other. We’re still in the process of winding down RN here at Nextdoor, but once we’re done I’ll make sure that sharing our learnings with the community is a priority.