React Native vs Native (iOS/Android) App Development Comparison

The modern mobile world offers many different ways to choose to build an app. React Native app development services is just a possible path to follow but in some cases it may be the best one. When? That’s what we’re going to find out today!

As you can remember, we already had one comparative article. There we tried to figure out which development platform is better: iOS or Android. Yet, it was a hard-fought battle without the absolute winner. But today we’re going to “ruin” the intrigue from the very beginning. What do I mean? Read on to find out!

🏆 React Native vs Native App Development: Who is the Winner?

During the work on clients’ projects, Stormotion developers had a chance to get experience in native & React Native app development and compare the effectiveness of both approaches. For example, our Text a Letter app is a pure “classic” native app while Civocracy is the vivid example of what we’ve achieved with React Native.

“Well, and what’s your conclusion?” you may ask. “Who is the winner?”

And the winner is… well, no one. Each our project required a careful and personal approach and, eventually, there is no universal answer for you. Instead, we want to tell you more about the strong sides of both - the native and React Native (RN) development so you can clearly understand which one is more appropriate in your specific case.

We’re going to start our journey with the classic Native App development approach. If you want to jump straight to the React Native part - click here.

👨‍💻 Native App Development Pros and Cons

Native is usually considered as the “classical” approach to building applications. What are its general characteristics?

• For native iOS development we use Swift programming language (previously it was Objective-C) and XCode integrated development environment (IDE).
• For native Android development we use Java or Kotlin as the main programming language and work in Android Studio IDE.

Actually, native technologies provide developers with all the necessary tools to create a brilliant app. Yet, if everything was so good, we probably wouldn’t talk about other tools like React Native, would we? So, let’s sort things out and distinguish native app development cons and pros!

Top 4 reasons to choose native app development

# 1: Direct access to native APIs & third-party libraries

While creating any kind of app, developers often use different APIs (which help to access different platform features like camera, Touch ID, geoposition and others) and 3rd-party libraries (which offer ready-made solutions for UI and UX elements). So, when building an app in the native environment, there are a lot of available native APIs and third party libraries that can be easily accessed.

# 3: No guarantee that your app will be approved

The last point is more like a warning than a disadvantage. When we compare native app vs hybrid app development, none of these approaches has higher or lower chances to get your app approved in Google Play Market or Apple App Store. So having your app written in Java or Swift doesn’t guarantee you a place among approved apps. Actually, reviewers don’t even have an access to your app’s code, that’s it.

I guess, now everything is pretty clear with native apps. So before making any conclusions, let’s figure out what you should know to develop a React Native app.

💻 The Main Points You Should Know About React Native App Development

React Native is an alternative approach to app development. This framework was created by the Facebook team as result of combining JavaScript web programming language and JSX markup syntax. Also, it doesn’t require special IDEs (like XCode or Android Studio).

Let’s review strong and weak sides of this framework.

React Native Pros

# 1: Can be used for cross-platform development

As you can remember, we already mentioned that native app development has a lot of platform-specific rules and features, so iOS and Android apps creation are totally different processes. However, it’s not a problem at all for React Native.

Since this framework is based on JavaScript (which is, actually, a web programming language), developers can easily reuse as much as 70-80% of the codebase for both platforms. Eventually, they’ll have to apply only minor native improvements that include deep linking, push notifications and native UI components.

🕵️ React Native vs Native App Development Comparison: How Noticeable Is The Difference?

We have already said enough about differences between both approaches. Yet, are they so crucial when it comes to the experience of your users? Many mobile developers endlessly argue on this topic, so we decided to choose another way. Instead, we’d like to show you how the basic elements of the same application are implemented using React Native and iOS native app development.

Thanks to John for his experiment.

Profile Screens

The first app’s tabs are profile screens. They offer the user to login using Facebook and retrieve the main user data from there - photo, name and email. Let’s compare them:

🗃️ More Examples of RN Apps

Not all big and famous brands prefer native app development but still deliver great products to their customers. Skype, Facebook, Airbnb, Bloomberg, Tesla and many other apps (you can read more about them in RN showcase) are created with help of this framework. Even the famous Instagram app was rebuilt using RN and it turned out to be definitely not worse than native version.

Stormotion team has also used RN framework during our projects. For example, this is the screen from the Pocket Promoter app developed by our team in JavaScript:

So, let’s sum up everything we learned today and make a conclusion!

💡 Takeaways

Today’s competition doesn’t have a clear winner. It all (everything) depends on your aims and resources. Yet, let’s recall the main strong and weak sides of each approach highlighted in this article: