React Native: A Year in Review
Article Summary
Martin Konicek reveals how a 2013 hackathon project became a framework that changed mobile development forever. One year after open-sourcing, React Native hit 30,000 GitHub stars and attracted 650+ contributors.
Facebook's React Native team shares their first-year retrospective after open-sourcing in March 2015. The article chronicles React Native's evolution from internal hackathon to cross-platform framework, detailing adoption metrics, community growth, and the infrastructure built to manage massive open-source contributions.
Key Takeaways
- 85% code sharing achieved between iOS and Android Ads Manager apps
- 30% of 5,800 commits came from external contributors, hitting 50% by February 2016
- Built automated bots to handle 266 monthly pull requests and 2,351 closed PRs in one year
- Microsoft and Samsung announced React Native support for Windows, Xbox, and SmartTV platforms
- 70,000 npm downloads in March 2016 with 107 apps in production showcase
React Native grew from Facebook internal tool to the 21st most-starred GitHub repo in 12 months, proving cross-platform mobile development could work at scale with strong community collaboration.
About This Article
As React Native grew quickly, the team struggled with code review and merging. Pull requests piled up without clear paths to the right reviewers, and getting code merged required too many manual steps.
Martin Konicek's team built two GitHub bots to fix this. The mention bot automatically suggests the best reviewers by looking at who last changed the relevant code. A separate shipit bot handles merging by running internal tests and syncing code between GitHub and Facebook's Mercurial fbsource repository.
The bots let the team close 2,351 pull requests in one year without sacrificing code quality. By February 2016, community contributors were responsible for over 50 percent of the monthly commits.