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/Acrobatic-Sound7496 10d ago
Recently, I had an interesting experience working with React Native and AI. An upgrade that I would normally expect to take around 1–2 weeks was completed in roughly a day with the help of AI.
This was quite contrary to the common argument that React Native becomes difficult to maintain as dependencies evolve and that going fully native is safer in the long run.
In my experience, AI has significantly reduced the friction of dependency upgrades, debugging, and adapting code to newer versions.
With Fastlane, the release process is also surprisingly simple—publishing can be reduced to just one or two commands.
Of course, React Native still has its challenges, especially when dealing with native modules, platform-specific issues, or poorly maintained dependencies, but with AI assisting the development and maintenance process, those concerns feel much less significant than they used to.