About
This project is a synthesis of live streaming mobile games and a competition platform that’s fueled by different technologies. The main purpose of the system is to enable users to host streaming video game tournaments and interact with other fans of live sporting events. Skillz, the leading mobile eSports platform, allows to compete 2.6 billion mobile gamers from all around the globe online. Over 12 million gamers use the platform to showcase their mobile gaming skills across 3,000+ game studios.
Challenge
Our team had to start with just one mobile developer who became a part of international cross-border development team. By then, Skillz has already implemented mobile framework with Objective-C and Swift languages which are native for iOS. Later on, the team grew on our side and some Android developers came on board. There was an idea to support another large mobile platform such as Android and create a multi-platform solution.
Our main goal was to significantly extend and improve the functionality of the mobile platform using React Native solution developed by Facebook. This approach allows to speed up development and switch to other popular mobile platforms if necessary providing a multi-platform support.
Solution
The decision was to use React Native which applies the React architecture to native iOS, Android, and UWP applications. The benefits of the approach are the following:
building native mobile apps using JavaScript and React, a React Native app is a real mobile app;
using native code when it needed;
User interface is mostly done on React Native which allows to easily use the same code between supported mobile platforms. Beyond that, some inner subsystems of the project are still implemented with native languages and frameworks for the platforms.