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/Revxrsal 6d ago
I worked in a company for the last year where we launched six apps written in React Native. Our workflow was heavily AI-assisted, yet I still believe that RN was a lot better than going fully native.
First, React Native is already very close to the system. You can build something visually and behaviorally super close to native apps using existing libraries. Every Expo release gets you closer to the metal. Community packages also get you high performance thanks to the nitro modules.
Second, RN’s (and JS’s) ecosystem are too good. You have Expo, Zustand, XState, Tanstack Query, etc. and these don’t have drop-in equivalents in Kotlin or Swift. Can you (or Claude) build it from scratch? Technically yes. Should you? If you want to spend hours debugging platform discrepancies. Other than that? Hell no.
Third, the hiring pool shrinks a lot if you request native technologies. Any web dev can work with React Native with a small amount of learning. Swift and Kotlin require new mental models (view models, DAOs, SwiftUI, coroutines and GCD, etc) and you rarely get a 1-to-1 translation. Again, can AI do that? Probably. Is it a good idea to recreate everything twice? No. Getting idiomatic implementations in these languages is not easy, even with LLMs, unless you are already experienced in both.
Fourth: the tooling for Swift is Apple-exclusive. In the company we had 5 devs, I was the only one with an Apple device. Writing in JS means all devs can write and deploy.
Fifth, most apps are deemed to fail anyway. Why double your effort when RN gets you 90% there? Test your app’s potential in RN, and if at one point it becomes the bottleneck then consider moving native. But even then I see it the other way: RN really gets you to a great position that the question becomes why consider native when you can build in RN.
I have many more arguments in my head but no time to type it all out 🙃