React Native apps are written in JavaScript, but the components you use are wrappers for actual native view components. So you get native performance (the view

React Native apps are written in JavaScript, but the components you use are wrappers for actual native view components. So you get native performance (the views can be GPU-accelerated), and native styles. I've been working with Android for a couple years, and (while I like it) it has it's warts. The architectural patterns required to keep a medium-sized codebase understandable are simply not agreed upon. There are lots of ways to do things, and (as the article points out) even the basic activity + fragment API's are very complex. I just started playing with React Native, after having some React experience, and it's a breath of fresh air. It feels like cross-platform without obvious negatives, and the rare bonus of being able to wrap + use native components or libraries whenever you need to. You can even share most of your code (even view code for basic views) across IOS and Android. React has a super simple API. The tooling is younger, but is out of the box faster to develop with than Android. That said, I haven't built a large app in React or React Native, and maybe it bites developers at some scale. No idea how it deals with long-running services, multiple threads, bluetooth or other hardware APIs. But for now, I'm very optimistic.