[PragmaticPulp]

I inherited a React Native initiative at a previous job. It was fine for simple things like login screens and settings pages, but as soon as we had to do anything complex (like audio/video) we ended up writing native platform code anyway. Now instead of benefiting from React Native we were writing platform code anyway and paying the React Native tax to integrate it back into the app.

[smackeyacky]

Xamarin is/was very similar. Want to do bluetooth? Out of luck, native library time.

I haven't looked at React Native, but in Xamarin all the easy stuff (basic layouts, logins etc) were no easier than writing native Android code, and the hard stuff was a lot harder due to having to integrate the native code.

[pjmlp]

That is the hard truth of any cross platform toolkit.

Which is why I always advocate for mobile Web (plenty of CRUD apps are doable as such), native views + C++, native + server driven UI/business logic.

Mobile SDKs are already complex on their own, adding an additional development stack on top just makes everything worse, and when things go wrong one needs to be skillful enough to dig deep down anyway.

If those JNI bindings are a pain to write, having to debug the additional layers that React Native, Xamarin, Flutter, whatever put on top isn't much fun either.