Why Airbnb Abandoned React Native and What It Means for Mobile Development

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The changes are slated for release later this year across all platforms.

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Airbnb Drops React Native

On June 20, Airbnb announced on Medium that technical and organizational challenges forced the company to abandon React Native and refocus on native development.

Key reasons included:

Inability to meet original goals despite widespread team reliance on React Native.

Technical hurdles such as initialization, asynchronous first‑render, and bridge infrastructure overhead.

Organizational constraints limiting resources for cross‑platform maintenance.

The company plans to cease new React Native features and transition high‑traffic pages to native code by the end of the year, with a gradual phase‑out extending into 2019.

Despite the shift, many engineers reported a positive experience: 60% described it as “amazing,” 20% as “somewhat friendly,” and only 5% were strongly negative. If given a chance, 63% would reuse React Native, and 74% would consider it for new projects, though the survey reflects a self‑selection bias.

Airbnb will continue contributing open‑source projects such as react‑native‑maps, native‑navigation, and lottie‑react‑native, moving them to the react‑native‑community organization.

Compiled from overseas media by 21CTO.