Shipit! Presents: How We Write React Native Apps

  • 3 minute read

On May 19, 2021, Shipit!, our monthly event series, presented How We Write React Native Apps. Join Colin Gray, Haris Mahmood, Guil Varandas, and Michelle Fernandez who are the developers setting the React Native standards at Shopify. They’ll share more on how we write performant React Native apps.

 

Q: What best practices can we follow when we’re building an app, like for accessibility, theming, typography, and so on?
A: Our Restyle and Polaris documentation cover a lot of this and is worth reading through to reference, or to influence your own decisions on best practices.

Q: How do you usually handle running into crashes or weird bugs that are internal to React Native? In my experience some of these can be pretty mysterious without good knowledge of React Native internals. Pretty often issues on GitHub for some of these "rare" bugs might stall with no solution, so working on a PR for a fix isn't always a choice (after, of course, submitting a well documented issue).
A: We rely on various debugging and observability tools to detect crashes and bug patterns. That being said, running into bugs that are internal to React Native isn’t a scenario that we have to handle often, and if it ever happens, we rely on the technical expertise of our teams to understand it and communicate, or fix it through the existing channels. That’s the beauty of open source!

Q: Do you have any guide on what needs to be flexible and what fixed size... and where to use margin or paddings? 
A: Try to keep most things flexible unless absolutely necessary. This results in your UI being more fluid and adaptable to various devices. We use fixed sizes mostly for icons and imagery. We utilize padding to create spacing within a component and margins to create spacing between components.

Q: Does your team use React Studio?
A: No but a few native android developers coming from the IntelliJ suite of editors have set up their IDE to allow them to code in React and Kotlin with code resolutions using one IDE

Q: Do you write automated tests using protractor/cypress or jest?
A: Jest is our go-to library for writing and running unit and integration tests.

Q: Is Shopify Brownfield app? If it is, how are you handling navigation with React Native and Native!!
A: Shop and POS are both React Native from the ground up, but we do have a Brownfield app in the works. We are adding React Native views in piecemeal, and so navigation is being handled by the existing navigation controllers. Wiring this up is work, no getting around that.

Q: How do you synchronize native (KMM) and React Native state
A: We try to treat React Native state as the “Source of Truth”. At startup, we pass in whatever is necessary for the module to begin its work, and any shared state is managed in React Native, and updated via the native module (updates from the native module are sent via EventEmitter). This means that the native module is only responsible for its internal state and shared state is kept in React Native. One exception to this in the Point of Sale app is the SQLite database. We access that entirely via a native module. But again there’s only one source of truth.


Q: How do you manage various screen sizes and responsive layouts in React Native? (Polaris or something else)
A: We try not to use fixed sizing values whenever possible resulting in UIs more able to adjust to various device sizes. The Restyle library allows you to define breakpoints and pass in different values for each breakpoint when defining styles. For example, you can pass in different font sizes or spacing values depending on the breakpoints you define.

Q: Are you using Reanimated 2 in production at Shopify?
A: We are! The Shop app uses Reanimated 2 in production today.

Q: What do you use to configure and manage your CI builds?
A: We use Buildkite. Check out these two posts to learn more


Q: In the early stage of your React Native apps did you use Expo, or it was never an option?
A: We explored it, but most of our apps so quickly needed to “eject” from that workflow. We eventually decided that we would create our React Native applications as “vanilla” applications. Expo is great though, and we encourage people to use it for their own side projects.

Q: Are the nightly QAs automatic? How is the QA cycle?
A: Nightly builds are created automatically on our main branch. These builds automatically get uploaded to a test distribution platform and the Shopifolk (product managers, designers, developers) who have the test builds installed can opt in to always be updated to the latest version. Thanks to the ShipIt tool, any feature branches with failing tests will never be allowed to be merged to main.

All our devs are responsible for QA of the app and ensuring that no regressions occur before release.

Q: Have you tried Loki?
A: Some teams have tried it, but Loki doesn’t work with our CI constraints.

Learn More About React Native at Shopify

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