When we originally got it running on Android (without the chat view since that component is native in the iOS app) we found that it performed quite poorly due to most of our pages being heavy on data and UI - as well as being very reactive (a typical discord server might have hundreds of permissions, messages and users all changing/updating in real time). React Native is single threaded and while iPhone’s have great single threaded performance, Android phones are more reliant on multiple cores and RN as I understand it mostly can’t take advantage of that.

On higher end Android phones the performance was actually fairly acceptable out of the box, but our user base has a lot of gamers who are running very old Android phones from many years ago - and in those situations the lag was unacceptable. For iOS, most users tend to only last one or two hardware generations behind.

Additionally, at the time React Native for Android had just been released and there were a whole host of other issues at the time - bugs and lack of Android specific components like the Navigator (which have since mostly been ironed out).

Today I think it is possible to build a fast React Native Android application and I would recommend someone starting from scratch do so :). However now the challenge is that we have an existing Native Android app so our users already have a baseline expectation of feature parity and performance. If we switch over we must meet or exceed that bar.