When we released Lottie 1.0 in 2017, it was just a few baby steps from its hackathon roots. Since then, Lottie has evolved into a mature library that has become the industry standard for enabling beautiful animations across any platform. Lottie for Android just crossed 30,000 stars on GitHub and is used in tens of thousands of apps across billions of devices. With this popularity comes a responsibility for Lottie to work reliably and for it to adapt as the Android community evolves.
The next major chapter for the Android world will revolve around Jetpack Compose. Jetpack Compose is a fundamental re-architecture of the way that Android apps are written. It is modern, builds on the success of React, SwiftUI, Flutter, and other functional reactive frameworks, and is built on top of Kotlin. …
Wow, what a journey Lottie has been. As Lottie nears its third birthday, it continues to grow and delight app creators and users around the world. The scale of Lottie continues to amaze us:
- Lottie is used in hundreds of thousands of apps and projects
- Lottie Android, iOS, and Web have over 64,600 GitHub stars and the repos get over 4000 unique visitors per day
- Lottie is on every Android device and nearly every iOS device in the world
As we approach Thanksgiving in the United States, there is so much to be thankful for.
Thankful For You
You bring Lottie to life by creating beautiful animations, seamlessly integrating them into your products, and delighting your users. …
Today, we’re extremely excited to announce the official release of MvRx 1.0. MvRx is an Android architecture library built on top of Jetpack that is easy to integrate and learn yet powerful to scale to large and complex apps. MvRx was created at Airbnb with the goal of allowing Android engineers to focus on building product. While the Android framework is powerful, it can be cumbersome to work with, even for experienced developers and can take many months to ramp up on for newer ones. In addition, at Airbnb, we saw people reinventing solutions to familiar problems such as sharing data between screens, handling configuration changes, and fetching asynchronous data over and over again. …
What if I told you that there was a way to get reliable hot reload on Android with zero compiler hacks using Android APIs that have been available since 1.0? While this trick doesn’t allow you to introduce new code, it does let you invoke a lambda with arguments from the command line and without recompiling or relaunching your app.
Turns out it’s pretty easy to trigger a function in your app with a locally registered BroadcastReceiver that can be invoked with an adb shell am broadcast. …
The new framework for Android is fully native but eliminates 50–75% of product code.
At Airbnb, we are moving at a faster pace than ever. Each year, more and more people are using Airbnb to travel. This year alone, we have already launched Airbnb Plus and we have countless other projects underway that we can’t wait to share.
On the Android side of things, the astronomical growth of the business has kept us extremely busy. Our app does more than ever. In the past year alone, we have added 286 new screens and that pace shows no signs of slowing down. …
Due to a variety of technical and organizational issues, we will be sunsetting React Native and putting all of our efforts into making native amazing.
This is the fourth in a series of blog posts in which we outline our experience with React Native and what is next for mobile at Airbnb.Where are we today?
Although many teams relied on React Native and had planned on using it for the foreseeable future, we were ultimately unable to meet our original goals. In addition, there were a number of technical and organizational challenges that we were unable to overcome that would have made continuing to invest in React Native a challenge.
As a result, moving forward, we are sunsetting React Native at Airbnb and reinvesting all of our efforts back into native. …
Bringing the best back to native
This is the fifth in a series of blog posts in which we outline our experience with React Native and what is next for mobile at Airbnb.
Exciting Times Ahead
Even while experimenting with React Native, we continued to accelerate our efforts on native as well. Today, we have a number of exciting projects in production or in the pipeline. Some of these projects were inspired by the best parts and learnings from our experience with React Native.
Server-Driven Rendering
Even though we’re not using React Native, we still see the value in writing product code once. …
Adapting mobile for a world with React Native
This is the third in a series of blog posts in which we outline our experience with React Native and what is next for mobile at Airbnb.
In addition to the countless technical pros and cons of React Native, we learned a ton about what React Native means for an engineering organization. Adopting it is much more complex than adding a new library or pattern to an existing platform. Doing so brought to light a number of organizational challenges. Unlike technical challenges which can often be solved or effectively worked around, organizational challenges can be harder to detect, correct for, and recover from. …
The technical details
This is the second in a series of blog posts in which we outline our experience with React Native and what is next for mobile at Airbnb.
React Native itself is a relatively new and fast-moving platform in the cross-section of Android, iOS, web, and cross-platform frameworks. After two years, we can safely say that React Native is revolutionary in many ways. It is a paradigm shift for mobile and we were able to reap the benefits of many of its goals. However, its benefits didn’t come without significant pain points.
What Worked Well
Cross-Platform
The primary benefit of React Native is the fact that code you write runs natively on Android and iOS. Most features that used React Native were able to achieve 95–100% shared code and 0.2% of files were platform-specific (*.android.js/*.ios.js). …
In 2016, we took a big bet on React Native. Two years later, we’re ready to share our experience with the world and show what’s next.
This is the first in a series of blog posts in which we outline our experience with React Native and what is next for mobile at Airbnb.
When Airbnb launched 10 years ago, smartphones were in their infancy. Since then, smartphones have become an essential tool to navigate our everyday lives, especially as more and more people travel around the globe. As a community that enables new forms of travel for millions of people, having a world-class app is crucial. Mobile devices are oftentimes their primary or only form of communication while away from home.
Since our first three guests stayed in Rausch Street in 2008, mobile usage has increased from zero to millions of bookings per year. Our apps give hosts the ability to manage their listings on the go and provide travelers with inspiration to discover new places and experiences right at their fingertips. …
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