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by _fat_santa 1866 days ago
I highly disagree that an expert RN dev also needs to be an expert mobile dev. Articles like these make it seem that react native development requires native knowledge but that simply isn’t the case. With almost all greenfield RN apps, 99.9% of the code is RN and only very specific feature are helped out by native code.
1 comments

You don't need to be an expert in native to write a RN app. However, you need to be very capable in native to have a responsive, performant, smooth RN app, and to keep it that way for years.

Large teams can afford to have a subset of platform devs and a large body of RN app devs to make this plan work (note: you now have 3 platforms: iOS, Android, and RN itself). Smaller teams will struggle. Most often, small teams will end up putting their weight on the RN side (develop new features!), and slowly slide downhill in performance, responsiveness and overall UX like the proverbial boiling frog.

> Large teams can afford to have a subset of platform devs and a large body of RN app devs to make this plan work

This has been my experience as well. I work on an app that supports multiple generations of iot products. We were forced to start developing for the next gen product in react native, and let the legacy stuff just use the exiting ios and android codebases. We made it about 9 months before throwing out the react native work and porting it all back to native. Management doesn't realize that moving to react native doesn't mean you now only have to support 1 platform, it means you're now supporting 3.

This is where Kotlin Multiplatform works well - you only need Android/Kotlin, and iOS/Swift skills. You save money where you can (e.g. shared code to do API calls / auth / calculations / etc etc) and still get the best-quality apps from the native code you're still writing.