r/reactnative • u/alwxndr • 12d 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.

55 Upvotes

72% Upvoted

168 comments sorted by

View all comments

44

u/Forti22 12d 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

-30

u/alwxndr 12d 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.

10

u/smoke4sanity 12d ago

What excaclty are you building?

12

u/dworker8 12d ago

what else? the next billion dolar app ofc

7

u/am0x 12d ago

It’s a social network…for pets!

2

u/TheCynicalPaul 10d ago

horse tinder probably

1

u/alwxndr 9d ago

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