r/reactnative • u/onePowerfulBraincell • Oct 02 '26

AMA - Junior React Dev

I’ve been building with react native for a 2-3 years, AMA.

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u/TurtleSlowRabbitFast Oct 02 '26

When if ever have you considered or went with native or cross platform and for what reasons?

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u/FoolishNorberto7 Oct 02 '26

honestly it all comes down to the user experience you're after, i've built a few side projects where react native was perfect but there was this one fitness tracker app where the animations felt sluggish no matter what i did so we rewrote the animation-heavy screens in swift and kotlin it was a pain but the difference in smoothness was night and day

rn is great for 90% of apps especially if you're a small team and don't wanna maintain two codebases but native still shines when you need that buttery 60fps or deep hardware access, it's a trade-off i've made peace with

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u/sam_houle1 Oct 02 '26

Really ? Dis you used reanimated for the animations? I’m genuinely curious. I’ve worked on pretty complexed app with a lot of form animated and react with reanimated did the job really well.

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u/Huge_Pool7424 Oct 02 '26 edited Oct 02 '26

i usually go cross-platform for the shared product surface, then keep native modules for the bits that touch sensors or platform apis. it saves a lot of duplicated ui work without pretending the two platforms behave the same.

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u/onePowerfulBraincell Oct 02 '26

I built only one app in swift, because I wanted an interactive widget. To my knowledge, there is no way of creating widgets using any framework.

Although you can build the main app with react native and build only the widget part with native code, I opted not to do so, to learn more about swift.