Photoroom is an image editor used by tens of millions of users around the world. As our web app team was crossing 5-developers mark, we found ourselve

Picking a state management library for a React app used by millions (and why we went with MobX)

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2025-01-22 09:30:08

Photoroom is an image editor used by tens of millions of users around the world. As our web app team was crossing 5-developers mark, we found ourselves running into more and more of the same issues: the whole app was rendering too often and we were frequently dealing with an endless list of useEffect dependencies.

What’s more, we were paving the way to introduce real-time editing: this implies a reliable shared state across iOS, Android, and the web.

We needed to rationalize state management in the app and migrate from the extensive use of useContext (with Constate). This article covers why we picked MobX, the transition and why we’re not looking back.

When it came time to take a decision that was probably going to impact the life of our app for the next few years, we used the tried and tested “measure twice, cut once” strategy

Members of the team pushed for Zustand but while we loved its simplicity, it also meant that it was less opinionated. We also considered the good ol’ Redux. The name triggered PTSD from copying boilerplate state code around 10 years ago (although I’ve been told the Redux Toolkit make it much less verbose these days)