Weekly Digest
Oct 20 - Oct 26, 2025
6 articles that week
Why Airbnb’s React Native Experiment Ended With a Complete Rewrite | by Yash Batra | JavaScript in Plain English
Airbnb bet big on React Native to unify their mobile codebase. Two years later, they scrapped it all and went back to native.
I Tried to Reduce My App Size by 50%. Here's What Actually Worked
A 260 MB productivity app? One developer spent a week cutting it to 95 MB and learned most optimization advice is wrong.
Evolving Mercari's iOS codebase into a multi-product monorepo
Shingt from Mercari reveals how they transformed a single-product iOS codebase into a monorepo supporting multiple apps—without halting work for 50+ active engineers. The result? A 38.8MB binary despite 900+ modules.
Nightly Swift SDK for Android
Joannis Orlandos just announced something that could reshape mobile development: you can now write Android apps in Swift. After a decade of Swift expanding to cloud, Windows, and browsers, it's finally landing on Android.
Performance Optimization for Android XR Devices
Google just dropped a comprehensive guide for Android XR performance optimization, and the stakes are higher than traditional mobile: miss your frame rate target and users get motion sickness, not just frustration.
Delivering Mobile App Updates Faster
Manoj Kumar Gubba from Mercari's iOS team reveals how they ship mobile updates in just 3-7 days. Most teams take 1-2 weeks, but Mercari's approach cuts that in half while maintaining stability.