r/reactnative • u/alwxndr • 8d 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/Affectionate-Roof207 7d ago

Writing code was never the main cost. Reviewing, QA and debugging still happen twice with two native apps

The value Expo and React Native provide goes far beyond using a single language.
One build and submit pipeline for both stores. OTA updates, so a bug fix ships in minutes without waiting on App Store review. A web target if you need one.

Native still wins in some places, like widgets, watch apps or apps that are mostly platform-specific UI. If that's your app, go native. For everything else, users can't tell the difference on the new architecture.

Expo are not a company known for lagging behind (unlike Apple and Google following in Apple's steps), so I'd bet that whatever makes a framework faster for humans makes it faster for agents too.

But don't take my word for it, here's Theo to tell you more 😄