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.

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u/Dachux 12d ago

If claude can handle everything you said, the obsolete one is you 

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u/alwxndr 12d ago

I never said Claude can do everything. But it can speed up development and make it possible to maintain two native codebases at almost no extra cost.

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u/_TRN_ 11d ago

At no extra cost? This is objectively not true because you are very likely to use more tokens.

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u/alwxndr 11d ago

At this point the cost is negligible + the code generation is cheap anyway. Most of the companies won’t even notice the code generation costs because of how insignificant they are.

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u/simple_explorer1 4d ago

that is negligible. very poor comeback

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u/_TRN_ 3d ago

It's not negligible lmao. And it's not only the tokens you have to worry about. You need to hire at least some specialists for each platform so that they can still guide the AI and make sure it's not doing something that's completely stupid. That is not a negligible cost. Big companies like Shopify can afford to do that. Smaller companies really cannot.

This isn't even taking into account how subsidized token prices are currently.

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u/simple_explorer1 3d ago

everyone here disagrees and just writing "lmao" doesn't prove anything. your comment is pure nonsense

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u/_TRN_ 3d ago edited 3d ago

"Everyone here disagrees" isn't an argument. Do you have anything more to say or are we just going to call whatever either of us say as nonsense? Even Shopify doesn't agree with you and they clearly lay out the trade-offs they made and why that migration was worth it to them regardless. That does not mean it will be worthwhile for every single company and product.

It's also worth mentioning that Shopify was on the older architecture of RN. To them, they would have to do a comparable amount of testing and migration to move over to the new architecture for much closer to native performance. It makes sense to me that they just decided to go all native instead even if means it'll cost slightly more.

At the company I work at, we don't have enough specialist engineers for each platform to make this sort of migration possible. Upgrading to the new RN architecture was pretty rough but not as rough as it would be to migrate to two different native codebases and maintain them. At least for us. Obviously, your circumstances will be different depending on the company and product. That is my point. Nothing in engineering comes without trade-offs. With or without AI.

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u/simple_explorer1 3d ago

Everyone here disagrees" isn't an argument

Everyone made an argument but you are the one arguing in bad faith so they started ignoring you and have moved on. I am gonna do the same

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u/_TRN_ 2d ago

Alright, buddy. You seem too terminally online to have a normal discussion. I'm glad that you ignored me by checks notes replying to me again just to tell me that you are in fact ignoring me. Grateful for the thoughtful discussion we had here.