Accelerating Mobile App Development at Zalando with Rendering Engine and React Native
Article Summary
Zalando is migrating 90+ screens across iOS and Android to React Native without rebuilding their entire app. Here's how they're pulling it off for 52M+ customers.
Europe's largest fashion e-commerce company needed to ship features faster across platforms while progressively migrating from native codebases. Their solution combines React Native with their existing web framework called Rendering Engine.
Key Takeaways
- Built 'React Native as a package' architecture to avoid dependency conflicts
- Standalone developer app lets web engineers work without building native apps
- Used react-strict-dom to share UI components between mobile and web
- Launched Discovery Feed (media-heavy screen) successfully with new stack
- Rendering Engine adds observability, caching, and analytics to components automatically
Critical Insight
Zalando achieved production-ready React Native integration in weeks by leveraging their existing web framework and treating React Native as an isolated package dependency.
