As others have said, these companies probably have experience (and love!) with building native apps. Now if they haven't built anything serious with the latest

As others have said, these companies probably have experience (and love!) with building native apps. Now if they haven't built anything serious with the latest non-native solutions, then their opinion will be just that: an opinion, but not expert advice. Also worth noting that their advice (go native!) can't be wrong technically. The native app will never be worse than the non-native one (given, of course, that the same level of effort and knowledge goes into them). If they don't do non-native apps, then they either take extra risks and efforts (which will very probably eat up any theoretical savings). I would say that you should find a company that does hybrid apps as well and ask them too. Or, instead of a company, you could look for an expert for advice and have him help you make a decision and pick a subcontractor based on your detailed requirements. Speaking about the technology: both PhoneGap and RN allows you to implement parts in native. React Native is called that, because it renders the UI using native components. (With PhoneGap you're running in webkit and thus your UI is html.) Here's my 2 cents on hybrid apps: I have build one using PhoneGap over 5(!) years ago. Well, almost 6 now. The MVP for my first startup. It was pretty simple, but looked nice, worked well on low end android smartphones (of the day!) and had everyone wondering how I was able to build all that (app, backend and a component running on a Shiva Plug) by myself. In hindsight, one of the mistakes I made was that I gave in when we got funded and agreed to have the app reimplemented in native for both platforms (ios+android). This cost us quite some money and time and it turned out that the users didn't really use our app anyway. One of the strengths of having a cross platform app is that you can do experiments with it a lot cheaper and quicker, for you don't have to implement everything twice. Especially, in your case where you have in house web devs, but no mobile devs. I have just met one of my former employees from the above mentioned startup of mine. He now works for an agency as a mobile developer. Back then he only did iOS, now he does Android as well. He showed me one of their newest apps for a big sports brand. They did that in RN. It looked pretty neat. It used OpenGL for the graphics on at least one screen (that was implemented in native). It was something that I would have said not to implement in JS, but the guy told me that it was a pretty successful project for them. The agency he works for only has 2-3 native mobile devs and a lot of web devs. I think he was the only mobile dev on this project with 6-7 web devs doing most of the code in JS. Of course, RN is fresh technology and can cause surprises. Another thing to consider, if an app is barely more than the mobile version of a website, then going 100% native might not make a lot of sense. Also, until you have enough mobile users, you might want to try something simple. Maybe even just a progressive web app.