It's the question we get in almost every mobile app discovery: "Should we do React Native or native?" The answer is almost always "it depends" — and the depends part is what most people haven't thought through. Let me give you the actual trade-offs.
React Native — one codebase, two platforms
React Native lets you write your app in JavaScript/TypeScript and renders to real native UI components. Your app looks and feels like a native app because it is one. The single codebase covers both iOS and Android, which roughly halves your development cost and time to market.
The gotcha: React Native is still a JavaScript app running inside a native shell. For most apps, this is completely fine. For apps that push the performance envelope — high-frame-rate games, complex animations, heavy computation — you'll eventually hit a ceiling where native code is necessary.
Native development — Swift and Kotlin
Writing in Swift for iOS and Kotlin for Android gives you full access to every capability of each platform. You get the latest OS features first, optimal performance, and the most polished platform-specific UX. Apple's Human Interface Guidelines and Google's Material Design are easier to honour when you're writing in the platform's own language.
The cost is doubled development effort: two codebases, two developers (or one who speaks both), and roughly double the QA work. For an MVP testing a business hypothesis, this overhead is often hard to justify.
How we decide
For most MVPs and standard business apps (fintech, e-commerce, healthcare, logistics) — React Native. The time-to-market advantage and cost savings outweigh any performance edge the app won't need. For apps with intensive graphics, real-time gaming, or complex hardware integration — native from day one.
The good news: if you start with React Native and later hit that ceiling, you can introduce native modules for the performance-critical parts. It's not a one-way door.