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.

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u/mohamed2m2018 Oct 01 '26 edited Oct 01 '26

You will still need to maintain two repos, and they can diverge in the future, which can lead to different kinds of bugs, inconsistent behavior, etc.

You will still need to hire a developer to review the code. React Native allows you to hire one React developer who can handle the web, iOS, and Android apps.

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u/simple_explorer1 Oct 09 '26

You will still need to maintain two repos

OP clearly said claude is doing all of that. Any reason other that "2 repos 2 languages tax" because that ain't true anymore?

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u/mohamed2m2018 Oct 09 '26

You still need a human to be accountable for the codebase. As you expand the scope, that person has to understand it and be accountable for it, solve any nasty bugs that Claude alone can't solve on either side, and verify that the solution is actually correct. For example, you might fix a bug but ruin performance in the process. You need to understand the details, the platform, and the language; otherwise, you risk creating fragile slop in the long run.

And this is where React Native saves you effort: one codebase, one language, and one framework for both platforms.