React at Meta Connect 2024
At Meta, React and React Native are more than just tools; they are integral to our product development and innovation. With over five thousand people at Meta building products and experiences with React every month, these technologies are fundamental to our engineering culture and our ability to quickly build and ship high quality products. In this post, we will dive into the development experiences of some of the product teams who leveraged React and React Native to deliver exciting projects showcased at Meta Connect 2024.
At Connect, Mark Zuckerberg shared that we have re-built Instagram and Facebook for mixed reality (MR) on Meta Quest. Our goal was to bring our flagship social experiences to the Meta Quest headset, letting people catch up with their friends and watch Stories and Reels, all while showcasing new possibilities enabled only through MR.
Building Meta’s social apps from scratch in MR required our teams to thoughtfully leverage the platform capabilities offered by Meta Quest while keeping a tremendously high bar for quality. The teams first had to decide how to build them: reusing the existing Android apps, writing a new native Android app, or using React Native to build from scratch. We wanted to offer a hero experience that looked and felt at home on Meta Quest, taking advantage of the additional input types, gestures, and larger visual surface area. Instead of simply porting our mobile social apps, we chose React Native as it enabled our teams to iterate and build quickly with robust animation capabilities, great performance, and a shared platform that powers most of the 2D Meta Quest system apps.
