Why we Continue to Invest in React Native in 2025
Find out how React Native matured from a Facebook experiment to become the industry standard—powering 30% of top iOS apps with native-like performance—and why it’s the strategic choice.
Is it worth investing in React Native in 2025? At Whitespectre, our experience tells us that the answer is yes. Today, we’re not just choosing React Native because it saves cost, we’re investing in it as a strategic technology that accelerates development, delivering tangible value.
In this article, we explore the evolution and maturity process of React Native, highlight its recent updates, and share success stories outlining why React Native is the framework of choice for building robust, high-performance mobile apps in 2025.
From Promising Prototype to Mature Platform
To understand the history of React Native, let’s go back a decade, when Facebook open-sourced it, promising a unified codebase capable of powering both iOS and Android apps. Here’s a brief timeline:
The Why
Now that we’ve explained how React Native has evolved into a truly mature platform as of 2025, let’s explore its benefits in more detail:
Talent Portability & Unified Skill Sets
React Native utilizes JavaScript and TypeScript languages already familiar to a vast pool of web and mobile developers. This makes it simpler to transition talent across projects, reduce onboarding time, and promote a culture of shared knowledge. Teams adept in web technologies can quickly adapt to building native-like mobile apps.
Code Reusability & Faster Iterations
By maintaining a single codebase for both iOS and Android, teams eliminate the need to duplicate efforts. They can quickly tailor incremental changes for specific platforms (iOS or Android) when needed, accelerating feature development and simplifying maintenance.
Active Community
Besides receiving strong support from Meta, React Native boasts a thriving, global community of developers that consistently contributes open-source libraries, plugins, and core enhancements to React Native continuously improving its performance and capabilities. This ecosystem promotes innovation and ensures quick resolution of common issues.
Performance
React Native apps can now achieve native- like performance, with libraries like reanimated, react-native-mmkv and react-native-flashlist, all while preserving the advantages of a popular language and an active community.
Example Code Snippet: React Native + Expo (2025 Best Practices)
Real Stories
A Recent 2025 App Store research positions React Native as the top cross-platform framework for building shopping apps. Impressively, 30 of the top 100 iOS apps (including the number-one-ranked app) are built with React Native. This widespread adoption shows its strong performance and ability to deliver exceptional user experiences in production.
If you want to explore more major apps using React Native, including Amazon, Facebook, Discord, and Shopify, check out Meta's showcase.
Conclusion & the Future
Over the past decade, React Native has evolved from a promising prototype into a fully mature cross-platform framework. Its native-like feel, unified codebase, and robust ecosystem have empowered us to build scalable, efficient apps that meet the demands of today’s market for the likes of Purple Carrot and SpotOn.
While other frameworks like Flutter continue to offer innovative approaches, our experience has shown that React Native’s deep integration with native modules, Expo ecosystem and supportive community make it the optimal choice for our strategic initiatives at Whitespectre.
Looking ahead, React 19 is already bringing even greater performance gains by automating many of the optimizations that previously depended on manual hooks like useMemo and useCallback. This evolution promises cleaner codebases and faster, more responsive apps.
