React Native Implementation at SoundCloud
Article Summary
Jan Monschke and Peter Minarik from SoundCloud took a gamble on five-month-old React Native technology. The result? They shipped a production app in four months instead of the estimated six.
In 2015, SoundCloud faced a critical shortage of iOS engineers while building their creator app, Pulse. With eager web developers available and React Native showing promise in design prototypes, they decided to test whether this nascent framework could handle a production mobile app. This is their story of going from skeptical spike to shipped product.
Key Takeaways
- Three developers (two JS, one iOS) shipped the app in 4 months with full test coverage
- Cross-platform code reuse can reach 85%, reducing new feature costs by 80-90%
- Existing iOS libraries bridged easily to React Native through native modules
- Live reloading and Chrome debugging massively shortened the developer feedback loop
- Bi-weekly React Native updates required extra maintenance time for third-party library compatibility
Critical Insight
SoundCloud successfully leveraged web engineering talent to ship a production mobile app 33% faster than estimated, proving React Native viable for teams with more web than mobile engineers.
