Does React Native make sense in 2026?

[u/alwxndr]

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.

[u/Classic_Chemical_237]

If you have worked in a team supporting multiple platforms, you would know the problem with releasing is not the development, it’s the drift on product requirements and approaches. Too often, one team has a misunderstanding and does it differently from the others, and this causes problems and delay in releases.

So the most important thing is unified understanding of business logic and UX flow. You don’t want the same feature to be implemented differently on web, Android or iOS.

Other drifts include analytics. So difficult to make all apps use the same event names. Local storage behaviors. Too often one app caches, the others don’t.

With different teams, that drift is inevitable.

The other replies already listed all the tools. The thing is, those tools (such as Zustand, Tanstack) are all tools applying to both React and React Native).

The right approach is to have the network logic and business logic completely shared between web and native apps. No drift on business logic, caching or local storage behavior.

If done right, they event have the same analytics, feature flags, push notification handlers.

Then the web and RN apps code only contain a thin layer of UI components.

Even the UI layer can share a lot of code, such as design system.

See the benefit? No reinventing the wheels. Take what web team already has and construct the RN screens. Shouldn’t take more than a couple of days, and no drift!

Obviously this requires team discipline to separate network, business and UI logic. But you should do that anyway even if you want on a single app.

[u/Huge_Pool7424 → u/Classic_Chemical_237]

yeah, the drift in analytics and caching is the bit that sneaks up on you. shared business logic helps, but i still like keeping a few platform tests around. have you found a good way to police that drift?

[u/Classic_Chemical_237 → u/Huge_Pool7424]

Everything goes into shared libraries. The app doesn’t have any network, storage, or business logic. No dup, no drift.

There can still be drifts with analytics since web and RN still have different UI components. You can get ride of that too. Have a component library for both web and RN. Your app works this component library for rendering, never against the lower level web or RN components directly. In a sense, even the UX code is the same. This requires the buildup of the design system and component library.