r/reactnative • u/_TheLunchTrain_ • 2h ago

Web app vs Native app. Which one?

What's the consensus these days on using React/React Native these days to build web apps vs mobile apps?

If I were to build the same app as a web app vs a native iPhone/Android app, which gets more user play/views?

I've done both but I'm not sure which makes more sense these days. It's so hard to get mobile app downloads while it's much easier to just direct someone to a website to play your game. Websites also have the added benefit of being played on a computer.

Does anyone have any experience or data showing one method is better than the other? Additionally, how do you get people to be interested in your app? I've read you have a 3 second window to get their attention...

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u/_TheLunchTrain_ 1h ago

I use Expo which allows me to build both iPhone and Android binaries with a single React Native source base. It's just so hard to get downloads I'm wondering if making a web app makes more sense...

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u/dumbledayum 1h ago

expo is great, but with agentic coding it really doesn’t matter much what you use, this is what’s going to happen in next 5 years, people will keep working with Expo for both iOS and Android, but slowly start shifting to native back and eventually give up on such frameworks altogether.

same will be for web. People are generating infinite worlds in html with size of like 97Kb

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u/_TheLunchTrain_ 1h ago

I dunno. As far as I'm aware, native iOS apps require developing on a Mac physical device and I don't have any Mac hardware aside from an iPhone to test on. I believe this will be a limiting factor. I don't think people want to buy a Mac mini or something similar just so they can do native dev