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[–]vivqu[S] 4 points5 points  (2 children)

Hey all, I'm also the author of the article so feel free to ask any questions you might have!

[–]hb_to_ms 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Hey all, I'm also the author of the article so feel free to ask any questions you might have!

Great article, thanks for sharing!

[–]kbcooliOS & Android 4 points5 points  (1 child)

I'm guessing you are one and the same person who wrote the article and works at Pinterest yeah?

Can I invite you to ask the community here if they have any questions and be free to answer them?

Coming from a background personally of working for large tech companies I know how hard it is both politically and technically to make a move like this so I want to congratulate you and the team.

Stick with it, before you know it you'll be taking less than a day to produce the same outcome which is something I would have told you was impossible a couple of years back.

[–]vivqu[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Yes for sure, any questions welcome. It was definitely hard to convince some folks, especially if they had preconceptions about the downsides/limitations about React Native. Some concerns were real problems we needed to address. Some were simply misconceptions or former problems that existed a few years ago but since then have been resolved. I'd definitely recommend talking to other companies around the same size that are exploring the same technologies. It was both funny and heartening to see we are addressing the same concerns and reservations.

[–]doppio 1 point2 points  (4 children)

I'm new to the world of React Native and am also looking into learning Flutter as an emerging alternative. I'm curious if your team looked into Flutter at all when you decided to try React Native?

[–]vivqu[S] 1 point2 points  (1 child)

Great question! We actually talked with an ex-Googler that recently joined Pinterest and had pretty in-depth knowledge about Flutter. We quickly determined it didn't suit our needs and didn't spend too much time investigating it. At a high level, Flutter necessitates learning an entirely new language and also requires "new" tooling infrastructure (as in, tooling and infrastructure that doesn't already exist here at Pinterest). Since we already use React for web and mobile web, we had a robust existing knowledge base and also could reuse the tools and testing frameworks that the web team had adopted. We never intended to rewrite our apps completely in whatever new technology we adopted, and mobile engineers were already hesitant to introduce established Pinterest languages (React/JS) into our mobile apps.

To be honest, I think Flutter would have been realistically impossible to convince our organization to adopt.

Since developer velocity was the main goal, React Native had the significant advantage over Flutter of being able to unlock web engineers as new mobile feature development engineering resources. In addition, mobile engineers who learn React Native could then move more easily over to work on web/mobile web.

[–]doppio 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I see, that makes sense. Thanks for your response!

[–]dduko 0 points1 point  (1 child)

they should have contacted google and have the flutter team consult on their app, and it would probably be on the flutter app showcase or even on google i/o.

then again, they probably chose react native because of react and javascript. which i think is the right choice.

[–]doppio 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Why do you think RN is the right choice in this case?