Zattoo has shipped streaming apps for over two decades, adding platforms one by one: Web in React, Android in Kotlin, Apple in Swift. Every new platform multiplied the work instead of extending it. The same feature built three times, in three stacks, by three siloed teams.
Then Amazon invited us to build for Vega, their new Linux-based OS where React Native is the primary UI framework, not an add-on. That became our catalyst to rethink everything: one React Native codebase across Web, Android TV, Apple TV, and Vega, held together by build-time overrides instead of runtime branches, organized by product domain instead of by platform.
This is the honest story of that migration. What carried over unchanged, what cost us sleepless nights with the Metro resolver, why Vega and Web turned out closer than they look, and where the React Native ecosystem still treats "iOS and Android" as the whole world when it isn't. A year of production data later, the surprises landed on the side of less work, not more.
