Skip to content
← Back to blog

Article · Blog

Why use React Native for your next app?

Five reasons I choose React Native and Expo for cross-platform mobile apps.

Why use React Native for your next app?

After years of native and cross-platform development, React Native has become my usual choice for mobile apps. I have shipped production apps with it and seen how a shared codebase affects both cost and development speed.

These are the five reasons behind that choice, along with the cases where I would still pick something else.

1. Development cost

One codebase, one development team

A “single codebase” is the main advantage. One development and design team can build a native app for iOS, Android, desktop, and the web.

With separate native apps, a company usually needs iOS and Android specialists to design and build the same product for each platform.

That can mean two teams and close to twice the cost. A React Native team can also extend the work to web and desktop.

Consider an application with authentication, a data-driven home screen, profiles, push notifications, and in-app purchases. Separate Swift and Kotlin apps need specialised developers, their own tooling and CI/CD pipelines, and two codebases to maintain. With React Native, one team shares most of the code and handles platform differences with the framework or small pieces of conditional logic:

import { Platform, StyleSheet } from "react-native";

const styles = StyleSheet.create({
  container: {
    paddingTop: Platform.OS === "ios" ? 44 : 0,
    // Platform-specific adjustments when needed,
    // but the vast majority of the code is shared
  },
  header: {
    fontFamily: Platform.select({
      ios: "San Francisco",
      android: "Roboto",
      default: "System",
    }),
    fontSize: 24,
    fontWeight: "bold",
  },
});

In my experience, more than 90% of the code is shared. What remains, roughly 10%, is usually platform-specific UI work or native module integration.

Tools such as Apache Cordova and Ionic use a web layer that can affect speed, battery use, and the interface. React Native uses native platform modules.

Flutter and Xamarin are other cross-platform SDKs that do not rely on a browser to render the interface.

React Native vs. native development

I am often asked, “Why not just build native?” The answer depends on the project.

Swift or SwiftUI on iOS and Kotlin or Jetpack Compose on Android offer the best performance and deepest access to platform APIs. Native is the right choice for a graphics-heavy game, a complex camera app, or anything that pushes the hardware to its limits.

For most business, social, ecommerce, content, and productivity apps, I have found the performance difference negligible. The difference in time and cost is not. Keeping two native apps at feature parity is roughly twice the work and can take even more once coordination is included.

React Native vs. Flutter

Flutter is a strong alternative, and I respect what Google has built. Its Skia rendering engine gives developers precise control over each frame, which suits custom interface work. I still prefer React Native for a few reasons.

Teams that already know React can carry their understanding of components, props, state, and hooks into React Native. Flutter requires Dart, which has a smaller ecosystem and job market than JavaScript.

React Native for Web lets mobile and web applications share a substantial amount of code. Solito can connect React Native navigation with Next.js routing. Flutter’s web support is improving, but React Native for Web is more mature.

React Native can also draw on the large npm ecosystem. Not every package works on mobile, but many packages for business logic, data fetching, and state management do.

2. Software quality

A single team working in one codebase and following one design approach has fewer places for platform versions to drift apart. In my experience, that reduces the chance of crashes and bugs and makes the product more stable.

React.js is widely used, which makes it easier to find developers who can adapt to React Native.

With less duplicated code, the team can iterate faster and spend more time on product details instead of fixing the same compatibility issue twice.

Supporting both major mobile platforms also gives the product access to more users around the world, including people without the latest devices.

Tools I use to maintain quality

The React Native ecosystem now covers the main parts of production app development.

React Navigation is the usual choice for mobile navigation. It reliably handles stacks, tabs, drawers, and deep links with native-feeling transitions. Expo Router adds file-based routing similar to Next.js.

For state, I can use the same tools as a React web project: React Context for simple cases, Zustand for lightweight global state, TanStack Query for server state, or Redux Toolkit when the application needs more structure.

For styling, React Native has its built-in StyleSheet API. NativeWind also brings TailwindCSS conventions to mobile, which lets me switch between web and mobile work with less friction:

import { View, Text } from "react-native";

function WelcomeCard({ name }) {
  return (
    <View className="mx-4 rounded-2xl bg-gray-900 p-6 shadow-lg">
      <Text className="text-xl font-bold text-amber-400">
        Welcome, {name}
      </Text>
      <Text className="mt-2 text-base text-gray-300">
        Your dashboard is ready.
      </Text>
    </View>
  );
}

React Native Testing Library follows the same user-focused approach as React Testing Library on the web. Together with Jest, it supports unit and integration tests.

3. Updates and development speed

With one codebase, a team can build a feature once instead of coordinating separate iOS and Android implementations before release.

The same applies to bug fixes and interface changes. Doing the work once lowers long-term maintenance costs and makes releases faster.

Hot Reload shortens the feedback loop, which helps teams get new features to users sooner. That matters when users expect frequent updates.

The React Native and Expo development experience has improved over the years. Fast Refresh, the successor to Hot Reload, shows most component changes on a device or simulator within a second. A full native rebuild can take from 30 seconds to several minutes, depending on the project.

EAS Update can send JavaScript bundle changes directly to users without an App Store or Google Play review. It does not replace normal store releases, but it can deliver small or urgent fixes and content updates in minutes instead of days.

4. The future of React Native

React.js remains popular, and React Native continues to move closer to it. That gives React Native a large existing community to draw on and makes its continued use likely.

Support for macOS, Windows, and AR/VR devices gives the framework room to reach more platforms and become a more common choice.

The new architecture: Fabric and TurboModules

Meta’s React Native team has reworked the framework’s architecture, its largest technical change since React Native began.

Fabric is the new rendering system. It replaces the old asynchronous bridge with direct, synchronous communication between JavaScript and native code. This improves animation and layout performance and supports features from React 18 and later, including Suspense and concurrent rendering.

TurboModules replace the old Native Modules system. The app loads them only when needed, which reduces startup work. They can also call native functions synchronously, something the old bridge could not do.

JSI, the JavaScript Interface, supports both Fabric and TurboModules. JavaScript can reference C++ host objects and call their methods directly, avoiding the old bridge’s serialisation cost throughout the framework.

Together, these changes rethink communication between JavaScript and native code. Apps on the new architecture feel more responsive, particularly during complex animations and transitions.

When React Native is not the right choice

React Native is not the right tool for every project.

For a 3D game, real-time video editor, or augmented reality experience that pushes the GPU, native development will give better results. React Native performs well in most cases, but its abstraction matters at that extreme.

An app built around advanced HealthKit integration or custom Android widgets may need so much native code that a fully native project becomes simpler.

For a small, single-platform app, the cross-platform benefit matters much less. If the product will only ever run on iOS, there may be little reason to choose React Native.

React Native can also get in the way when every screen needs heavily customised native components.

For most of the business applications I work on, those limitations do not apply.

5. Expo

Expo simplifies React Native development and app store delivery.

I have used Expo for years. Expo Application Services (EAS) makes app store deployment straightforward.

Expo began as a limited React Native wrapper. Its old managed workflow could not use custom native modules, and ejecting was a one-way decision. Development builds and config plugins now allow any native module without giving up Expo’s tooling and services.

The expo-dev-client package creates a development build with the app’s native dependencies included. It replaces Expo Go for this workflow and removes Expo’s biggest former limitation: developers keep its tooling while retaining full access to native code.

Expo is making cross-platform mobile development feel more like web development through services such as:

  • EAS Build: Compile and sign Android/iOS apps with custom native code in the cloud.
  • EAS Submit: Upload your app to the Apple App Store or Google Play Store from the cloud with one CLI command.
  • EAS Update: Address small bugs and push quick fixes directly to end-users.

Expo Router brings file-based routing to React Native, something I had wanted for years. Screens live as files in an app/ directory, while the router handles navigation, deep links, and URLs:

app/
  _layout.tsx        → Root layout
  index.tsx          → Home screen
  profile.tsx        → Profile screen
  settings/
    _layout.tsx      → Settings stack layout
    index.tsx        → Settings main screen
    notifications.tsx → Notification settings

The structure resembles routing in Next.js and Astro, so it is familiar to web developers. Universal links and deep-link support are built in.

Production use

React Native runs in production at Meta, across significant parts of Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger; at Microsoft in Office, Teams, and Xbox; and in Shopify’s Shop app. Discord, Coinbase, and Bloomberg also use it. Together, these production apps serve hundreds of millions of users.

These companies need to ship quickly across platforms while maintaining quality and keeping product versions from drifting apart. That is the problem React Native is designed to solve.

Final thoughts

React Native with Expo can handle most mobile applications while reducing development time and cost. I start by checking whether a project has a specific native requirement that rules it out.

For me, its familiar React model, broad library ecosystem, Expo tooling, and new architecture make it the strongest cross-platform option available.

See my Kukd.com React Native project for a real-world example.

Have a project in mind?

Tell me what you're working on and where you need help.

Get in Touch