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Comment by Cthulhu_ | Hacker News Reader

> However, if you want your app to have the best performance (spoiler alert, you probably don't)

Actually you do. An app like Facebook, Instagram, etc are used for hours a day; having a suboptimal performance directly translates to battery drain and a poor user experience, which costs you money.

I'm sure someone smarter than me has a nice soundbite about using the best tool for the job. React Native is a compromise. Web technology on mobile is a compromise.

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I did say “probably”. Facebook and Instagram definitely care about the last bit of performance. Your typical line of business apps don’t need to, and that’s a lot of the market.

Do they? Their apps are so inefficient that both of them have a "lite" version (instead of fixing the main apps) to save memory and perform better.

You seriously underestimate kind of phones this lite apps run on.

You have no idea what kind of low powered devices are out there in third world countries, with fragile/low bandwidth internet connections that need to connect to Facebook. The main apps are not the problem.

It's ironic you should mention apps like Facebook and Instagram[1]. They use React Native.

1: https://instagram-engineering.com/react-native-at-instagram-...

oh so that's why each time I reopen an instagram convo from the background, I have a blank webpage .. thanks RN !

But they DON'T USE React Native in the main feeds of either Instagram or Facebook. You know, where users spend all their time and performance matters.

You linked to a post about a bunch of settings/picker screens in Insta. On the FB side, my understanding is that only the Marketplace tab is RN, and maybe the settings & notifications.

> having a suboptimal performance directly translates to battery drain and a poor user experience

Removing messenger and fb app has increased my phone's battery life and my phone has become faster.

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