React Native vs Native: How to Pick the Right One
Both are good options. The right pick depends on your timeline, budget, and what your app actually needs to do.
This is one of the first conversations we have with every client building a mobile app. React Native or native? The answer is almost never obvious, and anyone who tells you one is always better than the other is selling you something.
React Native lets you write one codebase that runs on both iOS and Android. It's built on JavaScript and React, so if you already have web developers on your team, they can contribute. Development is faster, and you ship one update instead of two.
Native development (Swift for iOS, Kotlin for Android) gives you direct access to platform APIs, better performance for graphics-heavy apps, and a UI that feels exactly like every other app on the platform. The tradeoff is that you're maintaining two separate codebases.
We recommend React Native when: your app is mostly forms, lists, and API calls (which covers most business apps), you need to ship on both platforms and your budget is tight, your team already knows JavaScript, or you want to share code between web and mobile.
We recommend going native when: your app does heavy graphics, video processing, or AR, you need tight integration with hardware (Bluetooth, NFC, sensors), performance is genuinely critical and not just a nice-to-have, or you're building for just one platform.
In practice, about 70% of the apps we build use React Native. The framework has matured a lot. The apps we built with it three years ago still run fine. But we've also done native builds for clients who needed camera processing and real-time audio, and those would have been painful in React Native.
The worst decision is picking one because a blog post told you to. Look at your actual requirements, timeline, and team. Then pick. If you're not sure, send us your feature list and we'll tell you which direction we'd go.