Technical Solution and Performance of JD’s HarmonyOS Native App Developed with Taro

In January 2024 JD launched a HarmonyOS native app leveraging HarmonyOS NEXT’s full‑scene, native intelligence and security features, and in June released a trial version on Huawei AppGallery, planning a full release in September.

To meet tight delivery schedules, JD chose the cross‑platform framework Taro instead of native ArkTS, allowing a single codebase to be compiled into a standalone HarmonyOS app and to embed modular native pages.

Taro provides Web‑style development, extensive CSS support (flex, pseudo‑classes, media queries, CSS variables, etc.), and uses Rust‑based LightningCSS for fast compilation; its runtime draws on WebKit‑inspired CSS matching and a C++‑level rendering pipeline, while JD’s mpass team supplies routing, location and permission services.

Key advantages include rapid migration of existing Taro projects, rendering performance comparable to native ArkTS through C++‑level logic and the Yoga layout engine, support for virtual lists and node reuse, and native‑hybrid development that mixes Taro components with native HarmonyOS components.

Performance tests show the home page renders in 1062 ms (23.9 % faster) and the product‑detail page in 560 ms (74.2 % faster) compared with the previous ArkTS version, with most pages passing Huawei performance acceptance.

Future work will further separate JavaScript from the UI thread, flatten view nodes to reduce on‑screen component count, and enable dynamic updates without recompilation, continuing to improve performance on HarmonyOS.