Mobile teams have lived in the same tension for years: business asks for one codebase that ships on every phone, while engineers and designers push for Swift and Kotlin so the app feels like it belongs on the device.
Last year, I tried to predict React Native's future, anticipating widespread adoption of its new architecture, advancements in animation libraries like Reanimated, and a smoother developer experience through React 19 and React Compiler. A year later, significant progress has indeed been made, especially within the thriving Expo ecosystem, which continues to enhance accessibility and visual quality for mobile apps. However, React Native's core faces notable challenges. Integrating React 19 and React Compiler remains problematic, particularly with Android compatibility and conflicts arising from dependencies like Reanimated. Moreover, a fundamental mismatch has emerged between React's imperative virtual DOM approach and the declarative paradigms of modern native UI frameworks like SwiftUI and Jetpack Compose. These differences create severe performance bottlenecks, making it increasingly difficult to maintain native-level fidelity and responsiveness. With platforms like iOS 19 rumored to shift toward SwiftUI-first designs, React Native risks falling further behind unless substantial architectural changes are made. Teams embarking on new projects should carefully evaluate these challenges, as the choice of React Native could significantly impact future maintainability, performance, and user experience.
Navigating AI for Business: From LLMs to RAG - This comprehensive guide breaks down the tech stack, deployment options, and integration strategies for leveraging AI in your enterprise, comparing managed vs. self-hosted models and exploring fine-tuning and RAG techniques.
Xamarin, MAUI, Flutter, or React Native? This deep dive compares these cross-platform frameworks to help you choose the best path for your mobile app development in 2024 and beyond.
My last article about React Native in 2024 was a hit! 🎯 🎉 The number one question I got from people reading it was... Should I choose React Native or Flutter in 2024? So I went and wrote another comprehensive article comparing the two. You'll learn about what Flutter and React Native are as well as when and why you might choose one over the other in your app development projects. It's useful for developers *and* product managers, how about that?
React Native continues to evolve and make strides in 2024 as it faces increasing competition from other cross-platform tools. Key developments covered in this article include the growing adoption of the new architecture, the dominance of the Skia and Reanimated animation libraries, the rise of the Expo ecosystem, upcoming changes in React 19 and the React Compiler, efforts to unify the DOM between web and native with React Strict DOM and consistent event loop processing, and the introduction of the high-performance Static Hermes engine. The article examines how these innovations aim to improve performance, developer experience, code reuse across platforms, and create best-in-class user experiences as React Native solidifies its position as the preeminent framework for building world-class cross-platform mobile apps.
“KISS Architecture” explores the use of Flutter's inherent features to their utmost potential while curbing the use of third-party dependencies. By adopting this method, we achieve heightened software supply chain security, a crucial advantage for sectors such as healthcare, automotive, and finance. This approach simplifies developer onboarding, streamlines maintenance, and bolsters Flutter's robustness, making it an ideal choice for mission-critical, enterprise-grade applications demanding unwavering performance across various platforms.
Discover how leveraging OpenAPI specifications and client-side code generation can streamline mobile app development, particularly when using .NET Core and Flutter. By minimizing the non-functional "glue code", you optimize the development process, leading to a superior development experience and more reliable apps.
My open sourced example of a polar plot with smooth edges, created in Flutter. The plot is built using CustomPainter and is smoothly interpolated by employing the Catmull-Rom spline method.