Eh. Not sure I agree, unless you mean taking a non-native already made react bit and try to turn it into RN.. that is far harder and does require lots of money.

too many people don't realize just how non-portable react code can be.

No I mean building a product that works on web, android, and iOS, and has a native experience on all platforms. It’s hard enough to find a good web dev, but it’s far harder to find good iOS and Android devs. It’s a very large and expensive endeavor.

It is definitely a challenge, but as prev EM / hiring manager of many iOS / Android devs it certainly isn't impossible. Not sure about large and expensive. Surprisingly most of my best devs were all inbound, not via recruiters. Felt recruiters usually wasted our time and small teams of native devs can get a lot more done than web teams (at least so it seems based on my subjective exp).

My previous company had probably well over a dozen web engineers and then for our mobile side we had a total of 3, myself included. We also often had to adapt designs ourselves and work with product to fix flows for native. But we still managed to keep up with web.

edit: and not "keep up with web" in the we are working 80 hour weeks type thing, very normal working hours, 9-5. Possibly more normal than the web team.

Hah, just made a similar comment next to yours. 100%.

As somebody who did it several times in multiple companies, it's not as hard as it looks. Usually you don't want to replicate your complete frontend experience, only the user facing part (and admin panel/etc can be a lot of product). Also things like notifications, emails, etc are all usually dispatched from your backend.

So in a lot of cases having just 1 engineer per each mobile platform would be enough. And if you spend say 3 years building backend + web frontent, it would take about 6 months for each to replicate user facing experience on mobile. With current average global quality engineering cost of 70k/year, this means it only costs about $70k total to ship both mobile apps.

There are many ways to do it less efficiently, but this is my personal experience (as a CEO, EM and also iOS engineer in different setups) and it's really achievable.

It’s better to build one excellent app for 1 platform than 2 half-assed cross platform apps.

Not if you care more about making sure users can use your app (think services, etc). Or apps with network effects.

Depends on the market one must serve. Often 2 mediocre yet functional apps are better than none on 50+% of your market.

Yep. That’s where it becomes an unfortunate necessity.

No.

Besides companies, there are also solo web developers working on cross-platform apps. It opens up mobile/desktop app development to them. Learning new languages and platforms to create native apps might simply not be an option. And users benefit from more apps on the app store, more options for them.