This is where things get interesting in React Native. The answer is: yes you can have smooth animations. However, the animations have to be driven at the native

This is where things get interesting in React Native. The answer is: yes you can have smooth animations. However, the animations have to be driven at the native level and not in JS. The reason for this is: React Native is on a run loop. And on each loop, new state is shared over a bus from the JS side to the native side. So if you manage the frames of an animation over this bus, it's going to be very slow. If the native side manages the animation, you don't have this overhead. The same goes for touches. If you touch something, the native side gets the event and then this goes over the bus and RN picks it up. But if RN then responds to that touch by highlighting a view, that means another message has to go back to native - lots of overhead. For that to happen without a perceptible delay you have to have these events handled on the native side. Another thing that can happen is too many things in the view change at once: you then have a traffic jam on the bus and the UI slows down or becomes unresponsive. This can happen if state changes too quickly. You can get decent performance out of React Native (especially on tables, which is otherwise a dark art in iOS), but you have to know where the bottlenecks pop up.