Should I Build a Native or React Native App?

Businesses spend more than £150 billion on mobile apps each year across iOS and Android platforms, yet many of them make the wrong technical decision before writing a single line of code. The choice between native development and React Native isn't just a technical preference, it's a business decision that affects your budget, your timeline, your app's performance, and whether users will actually enjoy using what you've built. After building apps for clients across healthcare, finance, retail and education over the past ten years, I've watched this debate evolve from a simple cost calculation into something far more nuanced, and what surprises most people is that the "cheaper" option often ends up costing more in the long run when you factor in maintenance, updates, and the impact on user retention rates.

The platform you choose determines not just how your app performs today but how easily you can adapt when Apple and Google change the rules tomorrow

Look, I've had clients come to us after spending forty grand on a React Native app that barely functioned, and I've seen others launch beautifully crafted native apps that their users abandoned within weeks because the business model was flawed from the start. The technology matters less than understanding what you're actually trying to achieve and who you're building for.

What Native and React Native Actually Mean

Native apps are built using the programming languages and tools that Apple and Google designed specifically for their platforms... Swift for iOS, Kotlin for Android. When you build native, you're writing separate codebases for each platform, which means if you want your app on both iOS and Android, you're building two distinct apps that happen to do the same thing. React Native takes a different approach by letting developers write most of their code once in JavaScript, then the framework translates that code into instructions that work on both iOS and Android devices.

The technical difference matters. Native apps talk directly to your phone's operating system without any translation layer, they have immediate access to every feature your device offers, from the camera to biometric sensors to background processing capabilities. React Native sits one layer removed from the operating system, using something called a JavaScript bridge to communicate between your code and the device's native functions. If you're new to mobile app development, understanding these fundamental differences will help you make better decisions about your project's technical approach.

Think of it this way... native development is like speaking directly to someone in their language, whilst React Native is like having a very good translator standing between you. Most of the time the translation works brilliantly, but occasionally nuances get lost or delayed, and there are some conversations that just work better without the middleman.

The Real Cost Difference Between Native and React Native

When clients ask about costs, they usually expect React Native to cost half as much because you're building one app instead of two, but the reality plays out differently depending on what you're building. For a straightforward app with standard features like user accounts, content feeds, and basic interactions, React Native can reduce development costs by 30-40%, bringing a project that might cost £80k native down to perhaps £50k. That's real money saved.

The calculation changes when your app needs platform-specific features or complex interactions. We built a healthcare app that needed to integrate with Apple HealthKit and Google Fit, process real-time data from wearable devices, and maintain HIPAA compliance with encrypted local storage. The React Native version required so much custom native code to handle these requirements that we ended up maintaining nearly as much platform-specific code as we would have with pure native development, the shared JavaScript layer added complexity rather than reducing it.

Ask developers for a detailed breakdown showing how much of your app's functionality requires platform-specific code, if that number exceeds 30% of your feature set, the cost advantage of React Native starts to disappear.

Maintenance costs deserve attention too. React Native apps depend on Facebook's framework updates, community-maintained packages, and compatibility layers that bridge to native code. When iOS 16 launched, several popular React Native libraries broke, leaving apps in a holding pattern until package maintainers released fixes. Native apps accessed new iOS features immediately without waiting for third-party updates. This is particularly relevant when considering current app development trends and how quickly the mobile landscape evolves.

• Initial development for standard apps: React Native costs 30-40% less than building native twice
• Apps with complex native features: Cost difference narrows to 10-20%
• Long-term maintenance: Native apps often cost less to maintain over 3-5 years
• Developer hiring: React Native developers are abundant but experienced ones command similar rates to native developers

Performance and User Experience Trade-Offs

Users don't know or care whether your app is native or React Native, they just know whether it feels fast and responsive or sluggish and frustrating. The performance gap between the two approaches has narrowed considerably, React Native apps can feel perfectly smooth for most use cases, but there are still scenarios where native development delivers noticeably better results.

Animation performance shows the clearest difference. We built an e-commerce app with complex product filtering, animated transitions between screens, and interactive product galleries. The native iOS version maintained a consistent 60 frames per second even on older devices, whilst the React Native version occasionally dropped frames during transitions, especially when updating large product lists. Most users wouldn't consciously notice these micro-stutters, but they create a subtle sense that something feels slightly off.

Startup time matters more than developers typically admit. Native apps launch faster because they don't need to initialise a JavaScript runtime before displaying content. We're talking about differences measured in milliseconds rather than seconds, but research on user behaviour shows that even 200-300 millisecond delays in app responsiveness increase abandonment rates, particularly during the first-time user experience when people are deciding whether to invest time learning your app. This becomes even more critical when you consider how important first impressions are in determining whether users will stick with your app.

When Users Actually Notice the Difference

Real-time applications show the performance gap most clearly. We built a fintech app that displayed live stock prices and portfolio updates, the native version updated smoothly even when handling dozens of simultaneous price changes, whilst the React Native version required careful optimisation to avoid UI freezes when processing rapid data updates. Both versions worked, but the native app handled edge cases more gracefully.

When React Native Makes Sense for Your Project

React Native shines in specific scenarios that align with certain business priorities and technical requirements. Content-focused apps work brilliantly in React Native, if your app primarily displays articles, videos, social feeds, or product catalogues without complex interactions or heavy animation, React Native delivers an experience that users find perfectly acceptable whilst keeping your development timeline and budget reasonable. When comparing different cross-platform development options, React Native often emerges as the practical choice for content-heavy applications.

The best React Native projects are those where cross-platform consistency matters more than extracting maximum performance from each device

Startups testing product-market fit benefit from React Native's faster development cycle. When you're not sure whether your app idea will resonate with users, spending £50k to validate your concept makes more sense than investing £90k in native development. We worked with an education startup that built their initial MVP in React Native, gathered user feedback over three months, then made an informed decision to rebuild in native once they'd validated demand and understood which features users actually cared about. Understanding how to leverage user feedback effectively becomes crucial in these scenarios.

Apps with small teams or limited iOS and Android expertise find React Native appealing. If you have strong JavaScript developers but nobody with Swift or Kotlin experience, React Native lets you build for mobile without hiring specialists for each platform. This matters more for ongoing maintenance than initial development, you can make updates and fix bugs with one team rather than coordinating changes across two separate codebases. For those considering what technical skills to hire for their mobile project, React Native can simplify the recruitment process.

The Sweet Spot for React Native

Business apps with straightforward interfaces work well in React Native. We built an internal sales tool for a retail client that let their field representatives check inventory, place orders, and view customer information. The app needed to work reliably but didn't require bleeding-edge performance or complex animations. React Native delivered exactly what they needed at a price point that made sense for their internal tool budget. If you're planning a business app development project, React Native often provides the sweet spot between functionality and cost-effectiveness.

Why We Still Build Native Apps for Most Clients

Looking at our project portfolio from the past five years, roughly 90% of the apps we've delivered were built native rather than React Native, and that ratio hasn't changed much even as React Native has matured. The reason comes down to what happens after launch rather than during development.

Apps are never finished. This sounds obvious but it changes how you should think about technology choices. Every year Apple and Google release major OS updates that introduce new capabilities, change design patterns, and sometimes deprecate older approaches. Native apps adapt to these changes immediately because you're working directly with the tools that Apple and Google provide and support. React Native apps wait for the framework to add support for new features, and that delay can range from weeks to months depending on whether the feature requires deep platform integration.

We built a native app for a healthcare client that needed to support Apple's new health sharing features the day iOS released them, this capability became a competitive differentiator that helped them win contracts with two large hospital systems. If they'd built in React Native, they would have waited four months for the framework to support those features, by which time their competitor had already captured those contracts. This is why being aware of potential feature complexity issues early in the planning process can save significant headaches later.

• Native apps get immediate access to new platform features when Apple and Google release them
• Platform-specific optimisations work better in native code (battery life, memory usage, background processing)
• Debugging and performance profiling tools are more mature and reliable for native development
• Hiring experienced native developers often yields better long-term results than finding React Native specialists
• App store review processes are more predictable with native apps (fewer edge cases and framework-related rejections)

Long-Term Maintenance Reality

The apps we built five years ago in native code are still running smoothly with minimal changes required for new OS versions. React Native apps from the same period have required more substantial updates to keep pace with framework changes, dependency updates, and breaking changes in popular packages. This ongoing maintenance burden often exceeds the initial development savings, particularly for apps that need to remain in the app stores for many years. We've seen this pattern across various projects in our retention improvement case studies, where native apps consistently required less maintenance overhead.

Making the Right Choice for Your App

The native versus React Native decision isn't about which technology is better in absolute terms, it's about which approach aligns with your specific business goals, timeline, budget, and long-term maintenance plans. After a decade of building both types of apps, the pattern I see is that React Native works best for companies that need speed to market and have relatively straightforward feature requirements, whilst native development serves clients better when performance, platform integration, or long-term maintenance are priorities.

Start by honestly assessing what your app needs to do. Write down your core features and identify which ones require deep platform integration, real-time performance, or complex animations. If that list is short and your app is primarily about displaying content and capturing user input, React Native deserves consideration. If your feature list includes things like advanced camera functionality, background location tracking, complex data processing, or tight integration with platform-specific services, native development will save you headaches. Understanding the psychology behind successful app design can also inform whether your app concept benefits from the enhanced user experience that native development typically provides.

Your team's existing skills matter too. If you already have JavaScript developers and limited budget for hiring specialists, React Native lets you move forward with the people you have. If you're hiring developers specifically for this project anyway, choose the technology that best serves your app rather than conforming to your current team's skill set.

Budget and timeline constraints are legitimate considerations, just understand what you're trading off. React Native can get you to market faster and cheaper initially, but factor in the potential costs of performance issues, framework updates, and the possibility that you might need to rebuild in native later if your app succeeds and users demand better performance.

The choice you make today will affect your app for years to come, not just in how it performs but in how easily you can adapt to changing user expectations and platform capabilities. Choose based on where you're going, not just where you are now.

If you're weighing up these options for your own project and want to talk through the specific trade-offs for your situation, drop us a message and we can walk through what makes sense for your app.

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