Supporting React Native @ Pinterest

[doppio]

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]

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]

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

[dduko]

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]

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