- One React Native codebase covers most apps at roughly half the maintenance cost.
- Heavy camera, AR, or background-processing features are the clearest case for going native.
- React Native's performance gap versus native has narrowed enough to be irrelevant for most apps.
- The team's existing skill set should weigh heavily in the decision, not just the app's features.
One codebase, most of the benefit
For the large majority of apps — content, e-commerce, booking, most business apps — React Native delivers a genuinely native-feeling experience from a single codebase covering both iOS and Android, at roughly half the ongoing maintenance cost of maintaining two fully separate native codebases.
Where native genuinely earns its cost
Apps that depend heavily on custom camera processing, augmented reality, or intensive background computation sometimes hit real limitations in a cross-platform framework. For that specific narrow category, fully native development is worth the extra cost and complexity — but it's a smaller slice of apps than most founders assume.
The performance gap has mostly closed
Early cross-platform frameworks had real, noticeable performance issues compared to native apps. Modern React Native has closed most of that gap for typical app interactions — scrolling, animations, standard UI — to the point where users can't reliably tell the difference in normal use.
Team skills matter as much as app requirements
A team of experienced React/JavaScript developers will ship a better React Native app faster than the same team awkwardly learning Swift and Kotlin simultaneously. Existing team skill is a legitimate, practical factor in the decision, not just a technical purity argument.