All of what you said are pretty reasonable concerns. Basically React Native makes a lot of sense if you have a React web team. In this scenario it works well

All of what you said are pretty reasonable concerns. Basically React Native makes a lot of sense if you have a React web team. In this scenario it works well if you want to spin up an app from scratch or for growth related stuff within a brownfield application. It makes no sense for a native only shop. “But there is no use of native controls, so you're at the mercy of whatever crappy controls someone has created. Quality is seriously lacking for most of those. Essentially zero adherence to the greater platform standards or settings. Feels exactly like Java applets or Flash sites from the 90s. Blank canvas, roll your own everything. I guess the drawing of whatever you want is fast, but that doesn't make it "native".” This isn’t entirely true. You can wrap any uiview and embed it in the React Native view hierarchy. So you have a lot more flexibility than say Cordova (I.e where your ui is a big web view) Even if you do full native, you run into the same problems. I,e you are going to either use something from cocoapods or roll your own. I’ve seen plenty of half baked third party native libraries. “Also, I really dislike Javascript. Why would you prefer to write code in JS instead of Swift? The entire npm / dependency / build situation also felt incredibly brittle. Felt like if I came back to this app in 6 months and touched anything, there was basically 0% chance it'd still work without a ton of fiddling with dependencies, etc” To avoid having to deal with writing an Android app from scratch ;) I’m a native iOS developer, I mainly got into React Native last year because of all the issues around swift leading up to 2016 wwdc. This years it’s much better and I’ll probanly spend some more time learning it now that it seems stable. However I think it’s unfair to pretend that the last few years of swift have been a smooth ride. Modern JavaScript is a lot better than it was 4 years ago. However I totally understand why you would not be into it.