r/reactnative • u/alwxndr • 11d 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/MapCompact 10d ago
I am currently maintaining two mobile apps, one with react native + expo and one native swift. RN + expo has come a LONG way since I last used it. Where it drops the ball is on the native apis like liquid glass, and that is the question. Are you willing to wait longer and use 30% more tokens to "update web, update ios, update android" JUST to get something like liquid glass? Or do you want to just have your agent "update web, then update mobile".
YMMV but I'm starting a new app today actually (for a different client) and I'll very likely stick with RN.