Technology Radar
React Native has moved to Adopt as our default choice for cross-platform mobile development. While previously in Trial, the rollout of the New Architecture — specifically JSI and Fabric — has addressed long-standing concerns regarding bridge bottlenecks and initialization speed. Our teams have observed significant performance gains in complex UI transitions and data-intensive workloads. By moving away from the asynchronous bridge, React Native now delivers responsiveness that rivals native implementations while maintaining a single codebase.
We’ve used it successfully across multiple production projects and found the ecosystem around Expo and React to be mature and stable. While state management still requires careful planning, the productivity benefits of fast refresh workflows and shared skill sets outweigh these costs. For most hybrid mobile use cases, React Native is now our primary recommendation for teams seeking performance, consistency and speed.
We are seeing continued success with React Native for rapid cross-platform mobile development. Despite some churn as it undergoes continuing development, the advantages of trivial integration between native and nonnative code and views, the rapid development cycle (instant reload, chrome debugging, Flexbox layout) and general growth of the React style is winning us over. As with many frameworks, care needs to be taken to keep your code well structured, but diligent use of a tool like Redux really helps here.
Yet another entrant into the cross-platform mobile development world, Facebook’s React Native brings the React.js programming model to iOS and Android developers. React Native programs are written in JavaScript, but unlike a hybrid framework such as Ionic, React Native gives developers access to native UI components on the target platform. This is an approach we’ve seen before (e.g., Calatrava), but React Native has already inspired a substantial developer community and builds on the momentum generated by React.js. This framework could play a significant role in the future of mobile app development.
