This phase lasted over one year and was quite hard, according to Clark because engineers had to constantly juggle with two different tech stacks.

One of their initial steps was moving their iOS and Android code bases to a monorepo, with the aim to make it easier to develop the JS-native bridge, which was common to both platforms.

For example, Khan engineers started with the Search tab and created a bridge around it so it could coexist and exchange data with native components, which included networking, business logic, etc. Additionally, the different architectural choices dictated by the two underlying SDKs, tended to add up and made it ever more complex to keep the two apps in sync feature-wise.Īs in Walmart's React Native migration story, Khan Academy opted for a progressive transition where selected features of the two existing native apps were reimplemented using React Native. Khan Academy began its journey to embrace React Native in 2017 as an experiment aimed to reduce the inherent cost of maintaining two independent code bases for two apps that were very similar in design, features, and content.īesides the duplication of engineering effort, different code bases meant more complex interaction and communication among developers when adding new features or changing existing ones. After a two-year long transition from native to React Native for their iOS and Android apps, Khan Academy engineer Bryan Clark offered their view on the pros and cons of this decision.

Khan academy pros and cons