Adopting cross-platform React Native at scale: Zalando's learnings from the ongoing migration

Rene Eichhorn

Senior Sofware Engineer at Zalando

Rene is a Senior Software Engineer at Zalando SE who’s primarily contributing to Zalando’s in-house framework, bringing it to apps with React Native and envisioning a cross platform architecture. Outside working hours he loves tinkering small toy projects with Rust and is happy to philosophise about programming language design.

Adopting cross-platform React Native at scale: Zalando's learnings from the ongoing migration

What does it take to adopt React Native at the scale of Zalando? Rene Eichhorn (Senior Software Engineer at Zalando) shares the technical details and architectural lessons from Zalando’s ongoing React Native migration. The talk highlights both the challenges of brownfield integration and the strategies that make large-scale adoption possible.

▪ A non-standard brownfield integration strategy that enables progressive adoption without rewriting half a million lines of native code

▪ Building a React Native framework package for iOS and Android, enabling seamless interoperability with existing native apps

▪ Using React Strict DOM as a foundation for future web and mobile unification

▪ Extending React Native with Zalando’s internal React framework to establish shared patterns across web and mobile

▪ Balancing cross-platform code sharing with platform-specific differences to preserve native UX

▪ Lessons learned about experimentation, A/B testing, and scaling React Native to support hundreds of engineers

This deep dive shows how Zalando is bridging the gap between web and mobile, unifying development practices, and bringing React Native to enterprise scale.