Announcing Coinbase’s successful transition to React Native

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

The article reveals their specific timeline, the brownfield trap they avoided, and why they rewrote Android first instead of iOS.