[Cthulhu_]

But does RN actually save money? Or does e.g. having to keep up with the rapid development, maintaining your own native bridges and components, etc etc etc only cost more time and money in the long run?

I've read a bunch of react native postmortems and I'm usually reading "yes we're faster, but we're spending a lot of time on maintenance". It gives me the feeling it's probably faster short-term, but not viable long-term.

Besides, I'm sure there'll be a next big thing (Flutter?) soon enough, causing investment in RN to drop and it never getting up to par with the native platforms. (see also: PhoneGap / Cordova, Xamarin, etc).

[wsc981]

I think Xamarin really stays up-to-date with the newest features for iOS. At least that was true back when I wrote some apps with it, a few years ago.

I believe they have some automated tooling to update the APIs when Apple releases newer versions of the iOS SDK, so usually new features arrive on the same day in Xamarin iOS SDK as they do in Apple's iOS SDK.

I am not sure if the situation is the same for Xamarin and Android.

I wouldn't really hesitate to use Xamarin again in the future if a client requested it, but I haven't tried React Native yet and not sure if I should dedicate time for it or if it'll be gone in a few years. Seems quite a few mobile jobs require React Native experience these days.

[jeremyjh]

I’m not convinced everyone has these issues. I would agree if you have a native codebase then adding RN will only cost you. Not everyone has or needs a significant native code base.