David Mortenson, Facebook’s director of developer infrastructure, says that Facebook is going to be doing more mobile development with React Native, the social network’s open source JavaScript framework. In the past, Facebook experimented with building all of its apps in HTML 5 and JavaScript before determining that the Web technologies weren’t advanced enough. According to Mortenson, Facebook “realized the phones were not yet powerful enough and the model wasn’t there to have a really first-class awesome experience for both iOS and Android,” so they returned to native development.
With React Native, Facebook will get some of the advantages of Web technologies and some of the advantages of native development. “It gives us the best of both worlds,” explained Mortenson. “It’s an environment where you can iterate really, really quickly. You don’t have to rebuild the entire application to see your changes, you can just hit refresh in the simulator and you see them immediately.”
