During a hackathon, we took React, a JavaScript UI library that usually renders <div> and <span>, and adapted it to render iOS native UIView and UILabel. The potential was huge, we could get the best of the web: no compilation time, declarative code and layout and the best of iOS: high quality interactions and high performance.

As you can imagine, this wasn't easy to go from a prototype to a production-ready iOS backend for React. In this talk I'm going to walk through the many technical decisions that we did in order to avoid the terrible fate of other cross platforms projects that sold the "write once, run everywhere" pipe dream.

But even more interesting, I'm going to talk about the people side of thing. For example, from an iOS developer perspective, React Native is a very bad looking proposition: they've spent years mastering objective-C and all the iOS APIs, would they lose all those skills? Also, projects coming from the web have a bad track record to build high quality apps. I'll give you the strategies we used to overcome those challenges.