React Native vs Native App Development

The React Native vs native debate gets argued like a sports rivalry, but for most teams it comes down to a money question: how many codebases do you want to pay to build and maintain? Native means separate apps for iOS and Android — two languages, two teams, two sets of bugs. React Native means one shared codebase that runs on both. The performance gap that dominated this debate years ago has narrowed to the point where, for most apps, it's no longer the deciding factor.

We build with React Native and ship native when the project calls for it, so here's the tradeoff without the tribalism.

What React Native gets you

A single codebase is the whole pitch, and it's a strong one:

• One team, two platforms. You build once and ship to iOS and Android, instead of staffing and syncing two separate builds.
• Lower cost and faster delivery. Less duplicated work means a shorter, cheaper path to launch — which matters most for an MVP.
• A mature ecosystem. It's backed by a large community and runs in production at major apps, so the tooling and libraries are battle-tested.

For the vast majority of business and operations apps, this is the right default. The work that makes those apps valuable lives in the product logic, not in squeezing the last frame out of the GPU.

Two codebases cost roughly twice as much to build, and forever to keep in sync. That's the real price of going native by default.

When native is worth the extra cost

Native still wins in specific cases, and they're worth naming honestly:

• Heavy graphics or computation — games, real-time video processing, AR — where you need every bit of performance.
• Deep platform integration — apps built around the newest OS features, complex background work, or specialized hardware.
• A team that's already deeply native and ships faster in Swift or Kotlin than it would learning something new.

If your app isn't pushing one of those edges, paying for two native codebases is usually buying performance your users will never notice.

The maintenance question people forget

Most of an app's life happens after launch, and that's where the codebase count really bites. With native, every fix, every feature, every OS update happens twice — once per platform, forever. With React Native, it happens once. Over the years you actually run the app, that difference compounds into far more than the upfront build savings. The same logic that makes offline-first field tools practical to maintain — one shared codebase with background sync — is why we reach for React Native on operations apps by default.

A simple rule for choosing

Start with React Native unless you have a concrete, named reason not to. "It might be faster" isn't a reason; "we render 3D scenes at 60fps" is. For most products — marketplaces, operations tools, service apps, internal software — the shared codebase is the pragmatic choice, and the performance is more than enough. You can see the kind of work this applies to across our projects.

If you're deciding which way to build and want a recommendation tied to your actual app rather than a benchmark chart, tell us what you're building. We'll tell you which one we'd choose, and why.