Company
Date Published
Author
James Lee
Word count
1726
Language
English
Hacker News points
13

Summary

Retool Mobile, recently released in public beta, aims to simplify building and deploying internal mobile apps for iOS and Android, utilizing a cross-platform React Native app to render and update applications. The development team faced performance challenges due to the cross-platform architecture, initially using third-party component libraries, unnecessary re-rendering with Redux, and code-splitting inherited from their React codebase. To optimize performance, they replaced heavy third-party libraries with custom lightweight ones, minimized unnecessary re-rendering by refining state management, and removed code-splitting, leading to a 67% performance improvement. These efforts highlight the balance between rapid prototyping and production optimization, with further enhancements planned as they explore new architectures like React Native's Fabric.