For a startup, choosing the wrong app technology can cost you millions in burn and years of wasted engineering time.

Unless you see your business as a web only platform, there's a good chance you're going to need to make a choice early on about the technology used to build your app. This is a choice that will more than likely live as long as the company itself and will define your engineering team structure, development speed and budget for years to come. So it's important to get it right.

I've spent much of my career working with different companies and trying the latest and greatest technologies. Technology changes at a rapid pace, and often trends come and go quickly. But every so often you get something that sticks around.

React is a good example of one such technology. Before React, JavaScript frameworks felt like they were on rotation week by week with Angular, Dojo, MooTools, Ember, Knockout, Backbone, Meteor, Sencha and others being introduced and sometimes forgotten at rapid pace. Choices are still available in the web framework space - Vue.js and Svelte, for example - but with over 10 million developers worldwide using React, it's hard to ignore.

For a start up, there is often a business need to have a mobile app too. If you didn't want to commit to native, there's been a variety of frameworks that have come and gone in this space too - some which were incredibly difficult to work with or didn't feel like a native experience at all. Cordova, Ionic, Sencha Touch and jQuery Mobile spring to mind.

Today, the only real cross-platform competitors with staying power are React Native and Flutter, but their philosophies and ecosystems differ in ways that matter for startups.

React Native originally felt like a gateway for React developers to try mobile development, but lacked a lot of the tools and processes to make that journey easy. Like the frameworks I mentioned before, it also didn't feel very native - and as soon as you needed to build something outside of content you were hit with writing Swift or Kotlin anyway.

Over the last two years, the React Native and Expo teams have really pushed forward React Native as a viable technology for mobile apps and as of 2024, both Stack Overflow and Github stars show React Native is consistently among the top mobile frameworks, ahead of Flutter. Let's take a look at why.

Support

Improvements in what we can build in React Native have never been as rapid as they are now.

In 2024, the React Native team announced the New Architecture, which combined support for modern React features with direct access to native interfaces on mobile. This change has made apps feel far closer to the experience you'd expect from a Swift iOS or Kotlin Android application. The performance concerns that plagued early React Native applications are largely resolved with the New Architecture, with apps now achieving near-native performance while maintaining cross-platform benefits.

The Expo team themselves have been busy building a huge amount of libraries to make React Native development easier - from audio and video; to sensors and haptics; and security and storage functionality like biometrics and SQLite integrations.

One Codebase, Multiple Platforms

React Native allows developers to build apps with one codebase and release to multiple platforms - commonly iOS and Android, with Web support also possible with some extra effort. For cash-strapped startups, this resource efficiency is React Native's biggest advantage. Instead of hiring separate iOS and Android teams, you can build one team of JavaScript developers who can ship to both platforms.

But this isn't only about saving money - it's about speed. When you need to iterate quickly based on user feedback, having one codebase means one set of changes, instead of coordinating updates across multiple teams. However, a single codebase doesn't mean development time is completely halved for iOS and Android - each phone operating system has its own quirks - but it does mean that it is quicker to build in a single codebase and you are assured of feature parity between the two platforms. And if your idea pivots, then you only have one codebase to change.

Talent Accessibility

Like React, the talent pool for React Native developers is only growing. What was once a single developer adventure into app prototyping is now becoming a technology to seriously build full teams around. The concepts taken from React mean the doors are open to millions of developers to learn React Native quickly and efficiently.

Due to Flutter's different approach in this area, rendering everything through its own graphics engine, developers need to know how to program in Dart - a language with far fewer developers than JavaScript, making hiring more challenging and expensive for startups.

The Bottom Line

If your startup needs to prove product-market fit, React Native helps you move twice as fast with almost half the engineering spend. Companies like Discord, Shopify, Coinbase and Microsoft are big supporters of React Native citing development and iteration speeds as their main gains.

It's worth being clear: React Native is not a silver bullet. If your product is a 3D game or relies heavily on AR/VR then native code or specialized engines like Unity are still the best choice. But for the vast majority of startup apps - in the commerce, productivity, social, media business spaces - React Native provides near-native performance with far greater efficiency.

Flutter is strong, but React Native's ability to leverage existing React talent, its proven ecosystem, and Expo's investment make it the pragmatic choice for most startups.