Announcing Coinbase’s successful transition to React Native
Article Summary
Coinbase migrated 56 million users from native iOS/Android to React Native without breaking their $1.8B quarterly revenue stream. Here's how they pulled it off.
Between 2018 and 2021, Coinbase completely replatformed their mobile apps, rewriting 200+ screens and retraining 30+ native engineers. They took a methodical approach: test small, prove value, then scale up stakes.
Key Takeaways
- Started with greenfield Pro app, then brownfield onboarding, finally full rewrite
- Chose greenfield over incremental migration after learning from Airbnb's challenges
- Android rewrite took exactly 6 months with positive metrics across the board
- Now 113 contributors including web engineers who couldn't touch mobile before
- Teams went from 8 engineers per feature to 5 across all platforms
Coinbase successfully unified their mobile engineering around React Native, dramatically improving developer velocity while maintaining quality for 56 million users.
About This Article
Coinbase hired mobile engineers at half the rate of web engineers in 2017. Mobile engineer productivity stayed flat while web engineers got noticeably faster at their work.
Harry Tormey's team took a three-phase approach. They started with a greenfield Pro app, then rewrote the brownfield onboarding layer, and finally rebuilt Android and iOS from scratch. They skipped incremental brownfield updates after seeing how that approach had caused problems at Airbnb.
The feature team went from 8 engineers down to 5 across both platforms. React Native contributors grew from zero to 113, pulling in web engineers too. Both Android and iOS saw positive results when they rolled out, and the service kept running smoothly for 56 million users.