Progressive Web App (not an app)

Google’s approach to unifying web and app experiences

✘ No app store presence

✘ No push notifications (on iOS)

✘ Still lacking app-like experience

✔︎ Possibe to share code with website (and PWA websites load faster, giving benefits in Google ranking)

Wrapper app (e.g. Cordova)

Approach of putting your mobile website into an wrapper app

✔︎ Possible to share code with website

✔︎ Easy to update bypassing app store

✔︎ Easy to keep website and app features in sync

✘ Still lacking app-like experience

React Native app

Facebooks’s approach to efficiently building on all platforms

✔︎ Possible to share (partially) code with website

✔︎ Full app-experience (and possible to use native components)

✘ Relativly new language

● Could bypass app store by updating via Codepush (but is more effort than with the wrapper option)

Native app

Apple approach with Swift for iOS, and Google’s with Java for Android

✔ Full App experience and fastest performance

✘ Hard to keep both app features in sync

✘ Requires at least 2 teams

✘ Not possible to share code with website

We chose React Native as the option that achieves our goals and optimally combines a good app experience with a resource efficient solution. While technically possible, we don’t keep our website and app features in sync (via partial code sharing). We believe that our app is the future of our platform where we want to invest the most in. Yet for startups with very limited resources that need to support both a website and an app platform, I would go from day one for a ReactJS website + ReactJS wrapper app. If you have a very performance demanding app and have enough resources, fully native is still an option to consider.

React Native hiring challenges

Being a relatively new framework it is still hard to find developers with React Native experience. Your best bet is to find developers in the ReactJS scene that want to venture into React Native. For balance in the team it is also nice to have an experienced app developer that can advise and solve app performance issues.

Additionally there is always the chance one of the big React Native companies (Facebook, Instagram, Airbnb) hiring your top talent away. This actually happened, our team lost an awesome Senior React Native developer to Facebook in London.