Dream11’s big bet on React Native
Article Summary
Dream11 migrated 200 million users from native to React Native in 18 months. Their first production experiment? A 10% revenue drop that nearly killed the project.
Dream11's engineering team shares their journey moving India's largest fantasy sports platform to React Native, including the near-failure that taught them everything about cross-platform performance at scale.
Key Takeaways
- Initial React Native release caused 10% revenue drop and major performance issues
- Team grew from slow hiring to 100+ developers in 18 months after switching to JS
- 150+ over-the-air updates deployed via CodePush in one year post-migration
- Handled 11 million concurrent users during IPL 2023 on full React Native stack
- Brownfield setup allowed native fallbacks during aggressive migration timeline
Despite a disastrous first release, Dream11 successfully migrated 200M users to React Native, dramatically improving hiring velocity and deployment speed while maintaining performance under extreme load.
About This Article
In February 2022, Dream11 ran a React Native experiment that went badly wrong. Load times got slower, the app felt janky, and crashes spiked. Users who got the update saw a 10% drop in revenue and higher funnel abandonment.
Fenil Kanjani's team dug into the issues and fixed them systematically. They reduced view re-renders with memoization, built custom components for UI updates that happened frequently, switched to the Hermes engine, and deferred lazy initializations. The real problem was inefficient native realm communication happening thousands of times.
By IPL 2023, Dream11 was running their entire app in React Native and handling 11 million concurrent users without issues. They shipped 150+ CodePush updates over the year. The platform stayed stable at that scale while moving fast.