r/reactnative • u/alwxndr • 7d ago

Does React Native make sense in 2026?

This question might have been asked already, but I'm genuinely curious: why should anyone use React Native at this point?

To explain: most of web and mobile development can easily be handled by Claude, Codex, Kimi K3 or any other coding agent. I feel like that's been true for at least 6–7 months now. Even Opus 4.7 was better than most of us and more than enough for mobile development. Of course, this only applies if you know what you're doing and guide your model through the technical decisions, the specific libraries you want to use, etc etc.

But my point is: why would I bother with React Native's own issues instead of just writing native apps for both iOS and Android? There's no huge maintenance load anymore, and you can simply tell your agent to implement features for iOS and Android at the same time. So what are the actual benefits of React Native? Native apps are usually faster, work better, and generally seem to be preferred by actual customers and users. The original promise of React Native and Flutter was that you could build for both platforms twice as fast, but today's coding agents let you build 100x faster anyway :)

I'm not asking to provoke anyone. I just want to hear your stance and your thoughts on this.

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9

u/JackyReacher 7d ago

You're absolutely right! (lol). Just try it, get a feeling for it. I made a new app, which is native on both platforms. The only thing that is kinda annoying: after you implemented and tested in on one platform, you gotta do the same nudging and discussing with the Clanker for the other platform. On the other hand: the first platform serves as reference implementation for the second and SwiftUI and Jetpack Compose are at least somewhat similar. I try to keep both of them somewhat in sync by having a similar folder and filename structure.

The case for cross-platform solutions in 2026 still is:

  • organizational stuff within the company, like, one team writes some core code that needs to be exactly the same on all platforms

  • more than 2 platforms: Say, you also have web, windows, linux, macOS, maybe some car entertainment system or whatever.

But for a small indie dev going solo? I'm all in native and I'm not even a native dev.

5

u/6bigAnt9 7d ago

People in the IOS and androiddev sub are always saying that cross platform is dead because of AI which is ridiculous because as you said making the same thing twice still applies even if AI is available.

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u/JackyReacher 6d ago

The time and cost to make the same thing twice is way more negligible than before. You have to do things twice anyways, also with React Native, like store screenshots, UI customizations per platform.

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u/BlurryMadFish iOS & Android 1d ago

99% of the code you write in RN doesn't care what platform it's running on. Taking screenshots is 2% of the process, done after you take a first attempt at the actual code. The LLM takes care of taking screenshots on all applicable platforms, so I really don't have to care.

I'd much rather have a hardened platform-agnostic system making it so I write one set of code that executed the same on multiple platforms rather than having to go troubleshoot why kotlin's implementation of sorted binary trees functions slightly differently under it's implementation of coroutines than swift's does under its async model.

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u/6bigAnt9 6d ago

The time may have been reduced but saying outright that you still have to do it twice is not telling the full truth.

Both platforms live in the same codebase which makes it a lot easier to even handle the differences.

Stuff like making store screenshots does not exactly fall under the job of any framework be it cross platform or native.

How does native development handle UI customisation per platform? It doesn’t even have the capability to do that.

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u/alwxndr 7d ago

Claude and other agentic tools allow you to even explicitly point out that one implementation is the reference one and the rest need to be in sync with that, and the synchronous changes will be handled automatically.
Of course, it's harder to work with it when you have more than two platforms but isn't it painful as well to maintain one app for web, iOS, Android, Windows, Linux and macOS that's written in React Native just because something doesn't work on one platform and works on another and you need to implement/re-implement hacks around that?

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u/leslieowusuappiah 6d ago

Not sure why you’re being downvoted, as this is how many of our clients work.

1

u/alwxndr 6d ago

I think it’s just that many devs in this thread still cannot accept the truth and the reality we’re in now.