I work on React Native projects for a living and what you're saying is true. You need to use both Xcode with ObjC/Swift and Android Studio with Java to get the

I work on React Native projects for a living and what you're saying is true. You need to use both Xcode with ObjC/Swift and Android Studio with Java to get the most out of React Native. That comes with the additional complexity of also needing to learn how Xcode builds projects and how Gradle works. That's a lot of extra complexity, but it's also no less than if you had built two native apps. You're now just expecting a single team to manage it. My background is in "real" native development (both Android and iOS) so I get on fairly well with this, however, for people coming to React Native from the web side of things, it's a lot to take in. Overall, I still recommend to 90% of my clients that React Native is a good way to go if they have limited time and budget. For larger companies, they might have the budget to build and maintain two apps. Also, most apps really are just UIs on top of a REST API. And even if you do want to make something more custom, you can always create a native component or module yourself for each platform and wrap it to use it with the rest of your React Native app. That way the "boring bits" like the account management, data handling, etc can all still be shared. It's a trade off, but just about works out for me.