[eljimmy]

I would expect that if an app is popular enough to be in the top 100 then it most likely has the bankroll to pay for native devs.

I can't imagine ever seeing a non-native app in the top 100 with the exception of maybe ReactNative-based apps which is a bit of a grey area since it compiles into native.

[NateLawson]

There are many non-native apps in the top 100. Cordova is popular for business apps (Amazon and Walgreens both use it, for example). Unity (C#) is extremely popular for games because they built an awesome dev environment and it compiles to native, thanks to Mono's translation layer.

I agree that React Native is great, and you will be seeing a lot more apps using it, especially as their Android version comes out.

[dionidium]

I work on an SDK that's used by a lot of companies you've heard of. My experience is that a significant minority of them are using Xamarin/Cordova/Appcelerator and that we're asked if we support them more often now than we were a year ago. (Anecdotal, obviously.)

[eljimmy]

Do you have some examples? Not doubting you, I'd genuinely like to take a look at them.

[NateLawson]

Sure, just look at our public view of the data. It's limited to the top 500 free apps in the US. Choose category "cross-platform" and then compare iOS vs. Android. List of apps and the SDKs in each is at the bottom.

https://sourcedna.com/stats

[bjacobel]

There are many reasons a business might choose to develop a web-wrapped iOS application besides not having the "bankroll to pay for native devs."

[mwcampbell]

React Native apps aren't compiled ahead-of-time to native code; they use JavaScriptCore on both iOS and Android. Should be very easy to detect.