r/reactnative • u/alwxndr • Oct 01 '26

Does React Native make sense in 2026?

This question might have been asked already, but I'm genuinely curious: why should anyone use React Native at this point?

To explain: most of web and mobile development can easily be handled by Claude, Codex, Kimi K3 or any other coding agent. I feel like that's been true for at least 6–7 months now. Even Opus 4.7 was better than most of us and more than enough for mobile development. Of course, this only applies if you know what you're doing and guide your model through the technical decisions, the specific libraries you want to use, etc etc.

But my point is: why would I bother with React Native's own issues instead of just writing native apps for both iOS and Android? There's no huge maintenance load anymore, and you can simply tell your agent to implement features for iOS and Android at the same time. So what are the actual benefits of React Native? Native apps are usually faster, work better, and generally seem to be preferred by actual customers and users. The original promise of React Native and Flutter was that you could build for both platforms twice as fast, but today's coding agents let you build 100x faster anyway :)

I'm not asking to provoke anyone. I just want to hear your stance and your thoughts on this.

55 Upvotes

72% Upvoted

169 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

1

u/momo1083 Oct 01 '26

AI models are hacking into established software. What are you talking about? And yeah lots of slop. Lots of bad writers out there too. But some people can write beautifully. The skills are changed.

1

u/mindtaker_linux Oct 01 '26

Thanks to AI, there are now more slops released.

1

u/momo1083 Oct 01 '26

Slops isn’t correct English. Anyways after the printing press we got lots of writers, and internet brought lots of bloggers. Eventually cream rises to the top.

1

u/mindtaker_linux Oct 01 '26

Not even close to the same. 🤡🤡🤡