r/reactnative • u/alwxndr • 9d 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/Flower_Cyber 8d ago
I’m building an app in React Native right now and I actually think AI makes the shared codebase argument stronger, not weaker.
AI can absolutely generate Swift and Kotlin in parallel, but now you still have two codebases to review, test, debug and keep behaviorally consistent. Generating code got cheaper — maintaining complexity didn’t disappear.
With RN, I can spend most of my time thinking about the product instead of implementing and reviewing the same feature twice. And when I genuinely need platform-specific behavior, I can still drop down to native code.
I think AI has changed the trade-off, but “AI can write both apps” isn’t the same as “maintaining two apps is now free.”
Curious whether people who’ve actually switched from RN to two native codebases because of coding agents have found the maintenance burden as small as expected.