[marknutter]

What I'm curious to know is, outside of the arguments about React being the superior pattern for developing UI's, how is this fundamentally better than or different from other hybrid libraries like Appcellerator Titanium or Xamarin?

In my experience they all fall short when you try to get the last 20% of your app written. Because you're not writing in the native language, directly accessing native API's, you're always going to be limited to the abstractions that the hybrid framework has (or hasn't) defined.

I much prefer either going full native or full HTML5 because I never hit a wall when I try to do something that hasn't been covered well by the hybrid framework yet.

[EvanPlaice]

React Native doesn't use embedded webviews and provides an escape hatch to write native code when Reactive Native's capabilities fall short.

[marknutter]

That's no different than appcellerator or xamarin though. And in the case where you are just using embedded webviews you can easily write native code alongside them. Cordova is written in objective-c and is easy to understand.

[EvanPlaice]

You're right, I was thinking of platforms more like Cordova.

I did a little reading and it appears that React Native, Appcelerator, and Xamarin are pretty close to feature parity.