Pros and Cons of React Native For Developers and Business Owners

React Native, alongside Flutter and Ionic, changed the economics of cross-platform app development. A single codebase deployable to iOS and Android, with a native look and feel? That's a meaningful proposition.

React Native is built on the principle of "Learn once, write anywhere." You get a native result for both iOS and Android, and you can still include platform-specific modules when the situation calls for it.

For a developer with JavaScript experience (particularly React) picking up React Native and building with it is genuinely straightforward.

Monterail shipped Guild in React Native, a team engagement app recognized by Red Herring as one of the 2019 Top 100 European Startups. In this post, our developers and the business perspective are both represented. React Native has clear advantages and real limitations, and understanding both helps you make the right call for your project.

Business Perspective on React Native

Unlike some cross-platform frameworks, Ionic included, the Meta team built React Native to acknowledge the differences between platforms. You can still include modules specific to iOS and Android – status bars, navigation, native elements like camera and contacts, built according to each platform's conventions.

React Native for Web extends your React Native codebase to the browser, so a single team can target iOS, Android, and web without maintaining three separate codebases.

One important caveat: using React Native does not mean you will never need a native developer. If your app includes many different platform-specific features, some native development work may still be required.

Team Building Advantages

Your frontend web developer can become a mobile developer without learning Swift for iOS or Kotlin for Android. With some knowledge of native UI elements, React patterns, and platform-specific conventions, React Native is practical to pick up. That has a material impact on team building: instead of hiring separate iOS, Android, and web specialists, you hire JavaScript developers who can deliver across all platforms.

Code review becomes easier, knowledge transfer is faster, and the cost of onboarding is lower. React Native brings the velocity of web development to cross-platform mobile, with native results.

Performance

Native apps remain the theoretical performance ceiling. But in practice, React Native applications are close enough for the vast majority of product categories. As John Calderaio noted in a widely-cited 2017 iOS vs. React Native performance comparison, the two performed almost identically across CPU, GPU, and memory metrics (with React Native ahead in two of three categories).

React Native has advanced significantly since 2017. The New Architecture (Fabric renderer and TurboModules) introduced in React Native 0.68+ eliminates the JavaScript bridge in favor of direct JSI (JavaScript Interface) bindings, substantially reducing latency for native module calls. For most business applications, the performance difference from native is not meaningful.

Ideal Projects for Business Owners

React Native is the right choice when you need to:

• Ship on iOS and Android simultaneously without maintaining two separate codebases

• Move fast: JavaScript developers can be productive in React Native within days

• Keep a small, unified team across platforms

• Build applications with moderate complexity, i.e.: e-commerce, social features, content feeds, dashboards, booking flows, communication apps

• Use React's component model if you already have web React developers on the team

React Native is a poor fit when your application is graphics-intensive (games, real-time 3D rendering), requires deep hardware integration unavailable through existing native modules, or when platform-specific behavior is so different across iOS and Android that a shared codebase creates more friction than it saves.

Alternatives for Business Owners

Developer's Perspective on React Native

React Native is different from web React, and yet it works on the same principles. It comes with everything you need to start writing code immediately. No time spent configuring bundlers or evaluating module options before getting started.

Hot/Live Reload is the killer feature for daily development velocity. Changes appear immediately without a full rebuild. You don't need to constantly restart the app to see the effect of your changes, which substantially speeds up iteration and reduces compile waiting time.

For common UI elements (scrolling, animations, buttons, text inputs) React Native provides a well-designed set of components that handle the basics reliably. Component usage is considerably simpler than native development, and the mental model transfers directly from web React.

Adding Native Modules Is Not Always Straightforward

The npm ecosystem for React Native is large, but the quality is uneven. Third-party libraries for device sensors, push notifications, Bluetooth, and other native capabilities vary in maintenance quality. You may occasionally need to write a custom native module or adapt an existing one.

As Sophie Alpert noted in a previous State of React Native post:

"We're working on a large-scale re-architecture of React Native to make the framework more flexible and integrate better with native infrastructure in hybrid JavaScript/native apps."

That re-architecture (now known as the New Architecture) shipped as stable in React Native 0.76 (October 2024). The Fabric renderer and TurboModules replace the bridge with JSI, making native module integration faster and more reliable. The community has also grown significantly: React Native is now maintained by contributions from Callstack, Expo, Infinite Red, Microsoft, and Software Mansion, in addition to Meta.

Ideal Projects for Developers

React Native is the best fit when you want to:

• Build production mobile apps using JavaScript and React patterns you already know

• Target both iOS and Android from a single codebase without context-switching between Swift and Kotlin

• Work in a JS/TS monorepo where mobile and web share business logic and utilities

• Ship fast on both platforms and iterate based on user feedback

• Use Expo for managed workflow, which handles native module complexity for the most common use cases

React Native is a harder fit when you're building highly platform-specific UIs that behave very differently on iOS vs. Android, when you need graphics performance beyond what JSI can deliver (real-time 3D, games), or when the specific native module you need lacks a maintained React Native wrapper.

Alternatives for Developers

When to use Expo instead of bare React Native: Expo's managed workflow handles the native setup for you, no Xcode or Android Studio required for most use cases. 

Choose bare React Native when you need a custom native module not in the Expo SDK, or when your project needs deep native customization. 

Many teams start with Expo and eject to bare React Native as requirements grow.

Monterail's React Native Experience

Monterail has built production React Native applications across multiple product categories.

The Guild team engagement app was built in React Native, recognized as a Top 100 European Startup by Red Herring in 2019. The Beryl bike-sharing platform was built to serve hundreds of thousands of simultaneous users across UK cities (a case where React Native's performance characteristics and cross-platform reach made it the right architectural choice from day one).

If you're evaluating React Native for a new mobile project, Monterail's mobile development team can help you assess whether React Native, Flutter, or native development is the right fit, and build it either way.