Tl;dr: The replatforming of Coinbase Wallet’s mobile app reflects our commitment to improving access to web3. In this blog, we discuss why the transition to React Native marks a critical turning point for both our users and our technical teams.
By Chintan Turakhia, Director of Coinbase Wallet Engineering, and Dan Coffman, Coinbase Wallet React Native Lead
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This week, we announced the debut of Coinbase Wallet’s new mobile iOS and Android apps built using React Native. This launch marks a critical inflection point for Coinbase Wallet and its users, and we’d like to shed light on the motivation and journey to get here.
Our goal with Coinbase Wallet is to be the default gateway to the web3 ecosystem. We debuted a mobile app on iOS and Android in 2017 to make the benefits of crypto, self-custody, and the nascent dapp ecosystem accessible to all — regardless of network or blockchain, country or currency, crypto savvy or crypto beginner.
In 2021, we saw an uptick in web3 engagement via desktop, driven largely by NFTs and DeFi dapps. This led us to launch a Coinbase Wallet browser extension using React, providing users with the option to engage with the crypto economy on a desktop platform. This also gave our product, engineering, and design teams an opportunity to entirely rethink how a self-custody product should look and feel for power users as well as newcomers to web3.
Launching the browser extension unfortunately meant that our engineering teams now needed to code the same features for three different platforms, since Wallet’s browser extension, iOS, and Android apps leveraged different codebases. And as a consequence, our shipping velocity on extension far exceeded our pace on mobile. We knew that this wasn’t a viable long term solution to keep up with the innovation in web3. In order to maximize efficiency of our developers and designers as well as ship a consistently reliable, safe, and simple multi-chain wallet on all platforms, we would need to migrate our mobile products into a common framework.
Enter React Native.
We embrace the mantra of build once and ship everywhere. Replatforming Coinbase Wallet’s mobile apps to React Native means we can more easily ship new features to Wallet’s browser extension, iOS, and Android apps in tandem, streamlining workflows and allowing us to deliver the same great user experience across desktop and mobile.
In 2020, the Coinbase app successfully transitioned from native mobile to React Native, a software…
Click Here to Read the Full Original Article at The Coinbase Blog – Medium…
