I don't agree, and I have worked with this significantly as a consultant and core contributor to react-native. What typically happens is people convince themselves what you are saying is true then there ends up being huge delays to spin up all the infra app side... THEN eventually, they kinda are okay. until the next react-native release.

edit: would like to clarify that of course I would recommend better ways... but... clients do as clients do.

You are looking at this with hindsight bias and are assuming that for some reason the future will remain the same as the past. There are no fundamental reasons why ios and android development occur with two different ui frameworks in two different languages.

With low interest rates companies will not be able to justify paying 3x to maintain 3 different apps when they could theoretically just pay 1x for one app that works everywhere

The key word here is “theoretically”. These cross platform solutions are great in theory - who wouldn’t want to share code across all platforms? It’s a great sell, especially to the folks holding the purse.

The reality though is it doesn’t work well. The tooling, performance, debugging, library stability and observability are all substantially worse. Your team might save a ton of time spinning up a React Native app, but lose it all right back once you keep hitting gnarly Android performance issues.

In the future, once we have a proper cross platform development kit officially supported by Android and Apple, code sharing will be great. But today it doesn’t exist. And that’s why none of (the good) apps you use are written in a cross platform way.

Flutter’s development experience is better than RN’s, and perhaps even better frameworks will come in time.

Hard to leverage JS devs when it's an entirely different language from JS.

Dart really isn't hard to pick up and is surprisingly nice to write code in.

Good metrics for proposal to VCs .. to steel the cake from native platform overlord. Lets eat the apple and google cake to boost our return margins. Bam! VCs alliance for new scene graph renderer for the web on any device.

It’s the other way around. Don’t let native overlords eat into our cake.

For simple apps, maybe. But anything complex still requires native resources and expertise. So the value is greatly diminished.

How would you define a simple app out of curiosity?

> But anything complex still requires native resources and expertise.

Any examples of simple and complex apps?