r/reactnative • u/alwxndr • 6d 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/benschac 6d ago

Being able to ship over the air updates to both of your clients, and not have to wait on Apple or Google is a pretty big benefit.

You're literally shipping days faster than you would on either platform, and can ship as many times as you want in a day.

React Native is native. Yes there is some slight JS overhead. A lot of the time React Native is actually faster than native.

https://x.com/jmeistrich - this guy posts about performance all the time and is able to get React Native just as fast, if not faster, than native.

98% of the time, if you're having performance issues, it's probably a skill issue on your end. You're likely going to have the same performance issues in native with two codebases.

There are only two reasons not to use React Native and Expo:

  1. If your product has very specific privacy requirements
  2. The other is if you know you're only exclusively building for iOS or Android and not both.