Build Stuff'16 Ukraine

At Wix.com, we’ve been betting big on React Native. The official Wix app is developed completely in React Native and designed to cater to Wix’s growing userbase of over 100 million users. Production of this scale comes with its set of challenges, especially when using a framework this young.
There’s a difference between fooling around with React Native and making a hardcore app where dozens of developers work together on a single codebase with the purpose of catering to millions of users. Mobile Engineering at Wix.com was willing to make a bet on React Native, and we want to share our experiences and talk about our journey.
Developing quality native apps is challenging in a company like Wix. We have about 200 Javascript front-end developers and only 10-20 native developers (both iOS and Android). The core of the the Wix product is web-based. It’s obvious that in order to bring the product into native mobile form, we have to rely on the existing workforce and leverage the existing skillset. React Native makes this work, as 70% of our code can be in Javascript.
We’ll touch upon different aspects of our dev flow, like: how we break the app into modules which have their own lifecycle (snapshot/RC/GA); manage dependencies for multiple teams in one bundle; use redux in our architecture for maintainability and testability; separate concerns between different dev teams using IPC; perform testing - both unit tests, component testing, e2e automation and QA; move towards continuous integration and delivery; perform deployments and over-the-air updates; do crash/exception monitoring with tools like NewRelic; report to multiple analytics providers events with custom middleware; separate development between native and JS.
Another interesting aspect is how we divide our engineering teams between native developers and JS developers. What does each group do and when do we move tasks from one type of developer to another.