Our Journey of Making React Native a Preferred Choice

Nguyen and Sciandra describe Microsoft’s use of React Native across apps including Outlook, Word, PowerPoint and Excel, as well as Windows, macOS and Xbox. Teams work across separate repositories, platforms and React Native versions, facing issues such as large bundles and upgrades that take months. Their goal is a developer experience where teams can focus on their work rather than the tooling.

Microsoft built a reusable React Native test app so teams can try features without maintaining a separate native app, and it supports React Native versions 0.64 through 0.72 with nightly checks against the current nightly build. RNX Kit provides more than 20 standalone JavaScript tools, including Metro plugins and a CLI replacement. Sciandra says its tree-shaking plugin has cut bundles by up to 50 percent internally; Renault reduced a bundle from 18 MB to 4 MB, largely by removing unused Font Awesome icons.

Sciandra says upgrading from React Native 0.68 to 0.71 creates a large diff that would be difficult to repeat across many teams. Combining React Native Tests, which handles native files, with RNX Kit’s Align Dependencies tool reduced a live upgrade from 0.71 to 0.72 to three changes in about four seconds. The presenters then built and ran the upgraded app on iOS and Android.

After describing improvements to setup and upgrades, Nguyen and Sciandra turn to requests to reuse features across apps and bring existing web code to React Native. Sciandra demonstrates importing a web app’s battery-level code into a React Native app, while explaining that the demo does not solve the broader compatibility problem. React Native lacks browser Web APIs such as Navigator’s getBattery, and their survey identified around 200 APIs to consider.

Sciandra says the team wants to prioritize Web APIs based on actual usage, avoid shipping implementations that an app does not need, and make the work open source. Their RFC proposes support across iOS, Android, Windows and macOS, and they are discussing the direction with Meta. The implementation remains experimental, and the presenters invite community input rather than recommending adoption.