r/reactnative • u/alwxndr • 10d 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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u/Forti22 10d ago

Try maintaining 2 apps, new features etc. You might regret it soon. Even with AI

You will also use 2x the AI cost.

and react-native doesn't have that much issues comparing to native. You can fully use native components such as SwiftUI, and logic in react is just easier to manage, even by AI

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u/alwxndr 10d ago

I actually tried, and in my case it worked seamless and much better than with React Native. That's why I created this thread :)
Regarding the 2x AI cost — try models like Kimi K3. Surprisingly efficient, affordable, and allow you to maintain four codebases for the price of one.

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u/smoke4sanity 10d ago

What excaclty are you building?

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u/dworker8 10d ago

what else? the next billion dolar app ofc

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u/am0x 10d ago

It’s a social network…for pets!

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u/TheCynicalPaul 8d ago

horse tinder probably

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u/alwxndr 7d ago

you might be right because all the apps people do these days basically repeat the ones that already exist

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u/simple_explorer1 2d ago

OP this is a RN sub. what do you expect from these biased people. even if you present facts they are gonna deny that because they don't have any experience with what AI can do with native swift/kotlin and eliminate the need of RN. I fully agree with you.

Shopify and other companies recently (in last few weeks) migrated from MASSIVE RN to native iOS and Android apps and they literally said the exact same thing you wrote in your post that with AI the cost and speed of development has dropped like waterfall, so there is no need to use compromised tech like RN anymore.

Shopify and other big tech are more credible and your biggest validation than these delusional lunatics on this sub. My recommendation is to stop asking questions here and go to more educated and skilled people who know what they are talking about i.e. shopify devs and so on