React Native Pros and Cons – 2022 Updated

By Mariusz MarcakMay 4, 2022

I see web and mobile development technologies in a crazy race to improve their performance each and every year.

Obviously, that’s great news. App development is becoming faster and easier to execute, cheaper to implement, more user-friendly with less effort, and so on. We live in great times – implementing a business idea has never been easier and technology is opening the doors of imagination wider than ever before.

For example, let’s take a look at mobile development. Everybody wants to build an app, and everybody wants to use them (according to stats, mobile apps are expected to generate over $935 billion in reveue by 2023.)

But until recently, creating an app was very time and cost-consuming. And before going to the market, budgets could evaporate and so could the entire project. To avoid that, businesses started to look for alternatives, and they found that React Native development services are a great solution enabling easy creation of cross-mobile apps.

Today, you will learn about the benefits and limitations of React Native, and so you will be in a much better position to make an informed decision about adding it to your tech stack.

What is React Native?

React Native is an open-source platform created in JavaScript by Facebook. It enables you to build mobile apps for both Android and iOS operating systems. They can work on any device and still use one codebase only.

React Native is a perfect technology to save on development costs, yet still have truly native performance and user-experience flexibility.

It has a number of great advantages, many awesome “ready-to-go” templates, an army of dedicated contributors, and a crowd of fans.

Not to mention world leaders as core users:

It’s pretty much everything that technology needs to become hot and mature.

Although, like any other platform, it has its pros and cons and shouldn’t be used to execute absolutely every single project there is. We can see more and more developers and native developers choosing React Native as their core mobile development technology.

But it’s not the choice of developers only.

Thanks to many business advantages (great performance, low production and maintenance cost, and more), it’s not a surprise that many biggest players on the market are choosing React Native as well.

So what makes it so special for both businesses and developers?

Let’s dive more deeply into the advantages, and meet the pros and cons of React Native.

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When to use React Native?

To keep it short, all mobile app makers that want their apps to work on all devices, and two platforms – Android and iOS, yet still keep it all in one codebase only.

Although React Native is becoming better and better in terms of performance and it seems to get closer to a truly native experience, there are still many differences that we should be aware of.

Cross-platform vs native mobile app

The most important difference between native apps and cross-platform apps is that native app is made to work on a particular operating system. That means they can use all the blessings of that system, yet it cannot work anywhere else besides.

However, React Native aims to be platform-agnostic in the future, because of re-architecting the framework.

Although cross-platform apps have been made to work everywhere, they still lack the kind of flexibility and performance on a specific operating system that native apps have.

Take an alligator and a fish. An alligator can walk and swim, but will never swim as good as a fish. On the other hand, fish cannot walk at all. So cross-platform apps are like alligators. They can swim and walk, but will never be as good at swimming, as fishes (native apps).

This is why if you are planning to build a game, or something extremely demanding design-wise, you should make a comparison of a cross-platform app and native apps more closely, to decide what should be your choice. Native apps are still unconquered if it comes to performance, yet React Native is silently getting there.

Just mind that performance differences are only visible in extreme cases, so if this is not absolutely crucial to your business, React Native may appear to be a much better idea from a business and development point of view.

Take Shopify and their decision on going full gas with React Native.

After years of native mobile development, we’ve decided to go full steam ahead building all of our new mobile apps using React Native.
Shopify

React Native in 2022

Before I go to the actual pros and cons of React Native development I would like to quickly stop and mention what really makes me so excited: with every release React Native team makes new improvements, so it becomes more and more attractive.

And 2022 is another good year for the users as it brought us React Native 0.68 with opt-in to the New React Native Architecture!

The crucial point of the New Architecture is implementing a new rendering system – Fabric, that improves the interoperability between host platforms and React logic.

It renders the logic in C++, and the C++ core is shared among platforms, enabling React Native to render React surfaces synchronously.

Before that, the communication between the JavaScript and native thread was enabled by a bridge, which sends the data only after serializing as JSON. That effect in an asynchronous process.

Another important change in New React Native Architecture is the new, native TurboModule System – an enhancement of Native Modules.

This feature significantly influences the start-up time of React Native app, because it allows the JavaScript code to load the modules only when they’re required.

In the previous model, all the modules were initialized at start-up, which extended the load time.

The new architecture brings many advantages, like:

Type Safety ensured across JavaScript and host platforms.
Increased consistency, thanks to rendering implemented in C++
Better hosting platforms interoperability thanks to the new render system
Improved data fetching thanks to the integration with React Suspense
Even quicker start of the app thanks to TurboModules