I haven’t used their app, but scaling an app isn’t actually that difficult if the backend can handle it. I don’t think that their use of RN is relevant here unless you think there’s no way that a native iOS app of similar complexity couldn’t be built by two devs? But then you’d have to explain all the counterexamples, or even where a solo dev builds an app that goes viral and gets millions of users...
"Scaling" an app doesn't simply mean being able to use it on many devices (hence, "if the backend can handle it"). It also can mean you're able to be productive when adding new features to the application.
I specifically was referring to scaling to millions of users. I’m a solo app dev consultant and some of the apps I’ve worked on have had big spikes of users. No big deal.
It’s kind of like saying your frontend framework is awesome because it scales to millions of users. Well yeah, they’re all running it on their own machines, so assuming you can deliver the code to them and the backend can handle it, you could scale to quadrillions of users.
Yeah but the more people that use your app the more tested it gets. The more gnarly edge cases crop up, the bigger the impact if you accidentally ship buggy features, etc. Scale means even your front end has to live up to a higher quality bar. And given that app store downloads are driven by reviews, it's even more critical to avoid bad performance than on the web.
Abandoning something takes more work than using it, since it adds the cost of a rewrite. If Airbnb adopted framework X that wouldn't make me confident in framework X -- they haven't even used it yet! If they used it for a long time that would increase my confidence in X (in the absence of evidence to the contrary). But if everyone else started abandoning X I'd take Airbnb's experience with a grain of salt. I get that Discord is able to do well with it, but that doesn't mean everyone is able to do well with it depending on their needs. And who knows, maybe Discord is having just enough trouble that it hurts but too little to switch.
I was making a tongue in cheek retort about it “clearly” meaning that, since person I was responding to said it clearly meant they were dysfunctional. Probably could have made it more explicit.
I do think that scaling an app to millions of users says basically nothing on its own about the app framework / code quality itself. You’re scaling across as many devices as you have users. There’s no challenge at all there on the mobile dev side.
