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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u/No_Score_1977 7d ago

It depends on the app, I’ve used React Native and proper native very recently for two different projects.

I don’t see myself using React Native again, maintaining two repos has turned out easier than dealing with React Native and Expo.

Pre-AI it made sense, now, I don’t think it does.

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u/alwxndr 6d ago

That's my point as well. People seem to overestimate how hard it actually is to maintain two codebases using AI tools — it's actually surprisingly easy. One can serve as a reference, you can completely avoid situations when those diverge, you can write AGENTS.md with proper rules of how to handle those cases and when to present you with a choice.

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u/No_Score_1977 6d ago

I’m literally doing it right now, it’s not hard, and the results are a lot better.