Greetings, I'm about to launch a new product having previously coded (separately) in Swift and Kotli...

# android

[Yanay Lehavi]

Greetings,
I'm about to launch a new product having previously coded (separately) in Swift and Kotlin.
I'm told that RN "does the job" and there is no reason, really, to develop in Swift/Kotlin.
Has anyone here been on both sides of this debate and cares to give an honest opinion?
Many thanks

[Jeff Lockhart]

It really depends what you're building and your team's experience. RN could be a good choice for a team of JavaScript developers. Kotlin Multiplatform also could "do the job" and is still native Kotlin for Android.

[Pablichjenkov]

The truth about Flutter and RN is that you always need a native developer, to dig in and solve the problem when things don't work.
I have dealt with RN in all the companies that I have worked for. To reuse one screen here and there but the core code is native.
KMP doesn't lie about it, it doesn't hide the fact that you are gonna need a native dev always. It is a just tool to help native devs to reuse and share code but you have to be strong natively.

[Simon Peter Ojok]

I haved worked with RN, Flutter and KMM/KMP the truth is KMP/KMM is better because from the ground you are native and has no limitations.

[Matt Rea]

Agree with the above points. RN could work for a small scrappy project, to get you out the door quickly, if you don’t have much native expertise (but you will need to dig into some native regardless)

If you do have solid native experience and/or building a larger, long-term app, I would choose native

[Pete Hellyer]

Also agreed - I’ve rarely worked on a project that doesn’t need some native work eventually. RN or flutter will get you going in very simple cases. Certainly, in the iOS case, APIs are and remain “somewhat” of a moving target. You’ll eventually find undocumented breaking changes to various things - this happened with some WebKit interop I use from IOS16 -> IOS17, that one either has to wait for other devs to patch or fix in flutter or RN plugins (not necc anyone’s priority) or drop into native to sort out yourself.

[Andrew]

This is not the easiest question to answer because it depends on some details that even the project owner and team may not know the answer to. But at a starting point, if you have Javascript/web developers and want to go mobile, then RN. If you have native android/iOS devs then native. If you are hiring people it depends on the scope of the app and if the features are all relatively easy to do in RN or there will be difficulties they wish they had gone native half way through development. Planned size is probably a good estimator, if you expect a small team to make an app in less than a year and maybe 1 person to maintain beyond that RN could work, if its a small team maintaining and adding features for years then native might be the way to go, and of course mid/large size team probably just go native since you have the resources.

[Yanay Lehavi]

Much appreciated folks