[jwarren]

FlatList was absolutely the way to go here. In fact, we initially built the list in question when ListView was the only option. During development, FlatList was made available as an experimental component. It made a huge difference switching over to it. The optimisation we needed to do was to use onViewableItemsChanged to toggle the visibility of images. We found that otherwise it wasn't properly emptying the memory of Android devices, and it was easy to crash older devices. After implementing that, we got silky smooth 60fps everywhere.

The only issue was there was a bug in RN core. We submitted a PR which was finally accepted about 6 months later: https://github.com/facebook/react-native/issues/16612#event-...