Look, your app probably doesn't need to be native.
I said it. Most people won't. They'll try to sell you on the 'purity' of Swift or the 'power' of Kotlin. But I've been doing this for 15 years, and I'm telling you: unless you're building the next high-end mobile video editor or a 3D game that makes phones melt, React Native mobile app development is probably your best bet. It saves money. It saves time. It saves me from wanting to pull my hair out because I don't have to write the same logic twice.
Is it perfect? No way. It's actually a bit of a mess sometimes. But it's a mess that works.
The 'Write Once' Lie and Why It's Still Worth It
Everyone tells you that you write one codebase and it just magically works on iOS and Android. That's a load of crap. You'll always have those weird little CSS-like bugs where a button looks fine on a Pixel but disappears on an iPhone 15 Pro Max. I remember a client who spent three days arguing with me because a specific shadow effect looked 'too blurry' on his iPad. That's the React Native tax. You pay it in tweaks.
But here's the thing. Even with those tweaks, you're still finishing the project 40% faster than if you had two separate teams. One team. One language (JavaScript or TypeScript, if you're smart). One headache instead of two. That's a no-brainer for most startups.
The Performance Myth
People love to complain about performance. 'It's not native!' they cry. Look, if your app is basically just a series of lists, forms, and images—which describes about 90% of the apps on the App Store—your users won't know the difference. React Native uses actual native components. When you render a scroll view, it's using the platform's actual scrolling engine. It's not some slow web wrapper from 2012.
I've seen apps stutter, sure. But 9 times out of 10, it's because the developer didn't know how to optimize a flatlist or they're doing something stupid with the state. It's not the framework's fault; it's the person driving the car.
When React Native actually sucks
- Low-level hardware stuff. If you're doing intense Bluetooth Low Energy manipulation or custom camera filters, you're going to end up writing native bridges anyway. It's a pain in the neck.
- The dependency hell. Upgrading React Native versions is my least favorite activity. It's like playing Jenga with a blindfold on. One package breaks, then another, and suddenly you're spending your Friday night on Stack Overflow.
- Large-scale animations. If your UI needs to be incredibly fluid with 60fps complex transitions, you might hit a wall.
The Real Cost of Development
Money talks. Building two separate apps means two sets of bugs, two different release schedules, and twice the chance of your developers misunderstanding the business logic. I've worked on projects where the Android app had features the iOS app didn't have for months because the Swift dev quit. That doesn't happen with React Native.
You hire one solid team. They handle the whole thing. It's more efficient, and honestly, it's easier to maintain long-term. When I hand off a project to a client's internal team, they're much happier dealing with one repo.
Stop overthinking it
Seriously. Don't get caught up in the 'native vs cross-platform' debate for too long. Your users don't care what language your app is written in. They care if it works, if it's fast enough, and if it solves their problem. React Native gets you to that point faster than almost anything else. Just make sure you hire someone who knows how to handle the occasional bridge error and doesn't freak out when a Gradle build fails. Because it will fail. It's part of the charm.
Final thought on the ecosystem
The community is massive. That's the real kicker. If you hit a bug, someone else already hit it in 2019 and there's a thread about it. You aren't pioneering anything here; you're using a tool that's been battle-tested by Meta, Shopify, and Pinterest. If it's good enough for them to handle millions of users, it's probably fine for your food delivery app or your corporate CRM.
Comments
Be the first to comment.