Badoo was a dating company with several brands, 119 countries, four languages, and 355 million registered users. Its London office had about 15 Android and 15 iOS developers, and the company ran thousands of A/B tests across its mobile platforms.
React Native and Badoo story of a massive experiment
Speaker
Guillermo Orellana, an Android developer at Badoo, describes the company’s experiment with React Native at React London and how the team sought support for trying it.
The team wanted to make frequent changes for A/B tests without the effort of separately programming and scheduling so many releases. Orellana says they considered running tests in React Native and using CodePush, while requiring the result to feel native.
Orellana says introducing React Native required convincing managers who were unsure about it. The team built prototypes to demonstrate what could be done in a few hours, and showed developers tools such as the Chrome debugger and Redux action inspection.
The team still had to address integration issues, including its networking setup and React Native navigation. Orellana said they might need to experiment in production to demonstrate results, but the experiment was ongoing and he had no results to report yet.
Takeaways
- Tie a new framework proposal to a concrete business need, such as reducing the effort of frequent A/B test changes.
- Use a small prototype to show managers the time and effort a technical approach might save.
- Show developers the specific debugging and inspection tools they will gain.
- Plan for integration work around networking and navigation before expecting a framework experiment to succeed.
- Treat an ongoing experiment as unproven until it produces results.
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What was claimed 5
- works atGuillermo Orellana works at
Badoo
“I work at Badoo.”
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- metric
Badoo: 15 Android developers and 15 iOS developers in the London office
“We have 15 Android developers, 15 iOS developers.”
YouTube Unverified1 source· Talk
- metric
Badoo: 355 million registered users
“355 million registered users.”
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- uses
Badoo uses A/B testing
“We run A/B tests on all of those devices—thousands of them.”
YouTube Unverified1 source· Talk
- uses
Badoo uses React Native
“Maybe we can run every test in React Native and CodePush.”
YouTube Unverified1 source· Talk







