A few years back I was working with Titanium SDK to build apps in my spare time; so it was a pretty obvious choice for me to checkout React Native. It's pretty cool at first but once you dig a little bit deeper and try to tweak things here and there, add extensions, third-party frameworks, ..., the pain becomes very real.
In fact, I learned iOS app development using Swift & Xcode just to not work with React Native anymore.
I think the commenter is saying something I've felt about cross plat for most of the 10 years I've been working in it... ultimately the best user experience is delivered by the native platform and tools.
Cross platform tools can get you really close but you'll be spending a non-trivial of your time tinkering/tweaking shared code to fix or create different issues on different platforms. That's time that takes away from creating a great user experience on a single platform.
That's not to say Cross-platform tech is all bad. Just that you have to be aware of the tradeoff that you won't be able to 'give it your all' towards the best user experience on a single platform.
PS - the one tech stack that gets you really close from all the ones I've tried (Mono, C++, hybrid web apps, RN) is Unity. But that's for an entirely different use case than apps :)
The huge myth about cross-platform mobile development using web technologies isnthat it gives you a faster time-to-market.
The reality I’ve seen, developing both hybrid and native, is that native has the faster time-to-market because all of native stuff (debugger, GUI builder, etc) works out of the box and all the time saved by a shared codebase is eaten up with tweaking the shared code, having to do stupid JavaScript tricks, and dealing with all the bullshit of the web that hybrid development brings into your app.
I'm sure the users appreciate native. Native is the best you can get. Anything else my be better for the developer, but is worse for the user. Especially with something like power consumption
Yes, they do. Obviously they might not know that the difference is due to the app being coded differently, but people do notice the little bugs and odd workarounds and slightly off UIs in apps where the dev(s) are either not skilled enough or don't care enough to hunt down every case. Granted, they may not react (heh) much more than "Huh, this app does this weird thing"
Of course they notice. It is very easy to spot when a company is cheap and uses cross platform tech. Some (Xamarin) are easier to hide than others (RN, Cordova), but it’s always there.
In fact, I learned iOS app development using Swift & Xcode just to not work with React Native anymore.