Native vs. React Native for iOS: A Smorgasbord for Thought

If you haven’t been living under a rock for the past several years, there’s a good chance you’ve heard of React Native. If you have been a sub-rock-dweller, check out this article on React Native to get up to speed.

MacStadium is keen to help you stay abreast of the dominant trends in the world of iOS development. To that end, we’ve put together the following collection of resources to help you make a well-informed choice as to which route to take in the creation of your next application.

Swift vs React Native Performance:

Even before bugs, there are some demonstrable performance differences between the two approaches. The following article does a nice job of uncovering how Native Swift and React Native applications perform under the hood: Comparing the Performance Between React Native vs. Swift iOS Application Development, by John A. Coldero.

Swift vs React Workflow and Resources:

Focusing more on tools and approaches available to the different communities, this article has some great pointers and illustrations of best practices. It starts with benchmarking, helping users to make a decision. Then the article dives into debugging in a serious way, and has useful insights on tools, third-party libraries, and implementations, and mentions a few known issues: React Native vs. Swift iOS Application Development, by Rakshit Soral.

Holistic Developer’s Experience:

While performance is essential, so is creating a recipe for developer happiness along the way. With that in mind, check out the following article as it takes a more holistic look at this comparison. There is also some useful background on react native and a very interesting section on bottom-line decision making. Essentially, the article recommends those who are experienced with Native coding (in this case iOS) are the best suited to React Native, and it only really makes sense if the app is multi-platform: Mobile App Development React Native vs. Native iOS Android, by Dino Trnka.

Outcomes:

There is no wrong decision, just the best decision for your use case. The main advice from MacStadium is to make sure testing takes a more critical role if you decide to go React Native, as one language going to two different platforms has issues. It can also be a great time-saver if two different code bases are not well-established.

On this front, the more entrenched companies are more likely to have already embraced native iOS / Swift code, while newcomers to the market are more likely to use a tool like React Native from the start. Either way, when managing infrastructure becomes an issue, MacStadium is happy to help provide CI/CD compliant machines virtualization layers or physical machines to develop, test or build on.