I have a great example how React Native can be better than native apps… I personally, with a few of my friends my company, we built a media player for singers… And fun fact is that the company came to us, having already built the mobile app by one of the best agencies in Europe, and they were struggling with the performance. We were able to outperform the performance of the native app with React Native two years ago, without all the great things that we have right now. So it is totally doable, and actually the reason their approach was slow was that it was all imperative, so the declarative nature of React Native sort of won.

Regarding your question about companies leaving - you know, it’s always gonna happen, because React Native itself is not a silver bullet, and it’s getting great adoption at different businesses, and they are trying React Native to see if it fits their business goals and architecture.

[ ] One of the approaches with React Native - there’s the brown field approach, where you integrate React Native into existing infrastructure, and the green field one, where you start from scratch. So it can always happen that when you start integrating React Native into a native app, it will not work for you. For Airbnb it didn’t work out in the long-term, just because of the trade-offs were not good for them, and I think the article was pretty explicit about that… But there are hundreds of companies using React Native, and actually thousands of apps in the app store. I’m not sure if I can disclose the number and how it was mined, but there’s a lot of React Native applications out there, and they are in a pretty good shape.

Last year when we were talking about React Native, there were a lot of people asking me and other contributors “How is React Native looking like?”, whether it’s gonna be the thing, or it’s gonna sort of vanish… And the general feeling inside the community was that we could do better, and everybody was slowing getting out of ideas… But things dramatically improved since then, and over the last year things changed from being not so good to being amazing. We have a lot of great development going on, such as the new re-architecture, that will allow great things to happen, especially for the native developers. So a lot of these advantages that these companies are talking about right now will be totally gone in a matter of a few months…

So I’d say there’s a really bright future ahead, in front of React Native. I’m saying that after exploring Flutter and other technologies for mobile alternatives… I’m still thinking that React Native is the best technology right now on the market for that particular cross-platform solution. I checked the others, and speaking of trade-offs, I think it’s just the best one, unless you don’t need a cross-platform app; if you are building a game, probably just build a native app. That’s not the failure of React Native, it’s just for that particular app you just need native code.