Are there any real trends towards crowding out native mobile development by cross-platform solutions?

Question

Mobile development

Are React Native and others like it taking over the market? And if so, how effective is it? What is your assessment, forecasts, vision of the future...?!

Answer 1

The main problem of cross-platform is that it is difficult to support everything at once. At the same time, everything should work as fast as on the native. And the code should be easy and understandable.
A new feature has been released on some platform, it has not been released on another, but it will be released later. The cross-platform needs to be upgraded immediately. Companies like Apple/Google don't need it, they only care about their platforms and languages.
Here is a series of articles about the experience of using React Native at Airbnb - https://medium.com/airbnb-engineering/sunsetting-r... They described their experience with RN and why they eventually returned to native development.
What to use in development - it all depends on the tasks. Somewhere it's easier to use a cross-platform, somewhere it's better to use native. So far, native is more often chosen, I do not see the prerequisites for the victory of the cross-platform in the near future.
I have friends who successfully write in Flutter or React Native, but there are very few of them among mobile developers (as well as the vacancies themselves).

Answer 2

The short answer is yes. I speak Flutter because native development is long and expensive, you need to keep at least two developers on staff in order to have speed and support for two android / ios platforms. Competitors will be at least one step ahead through the use of cross-platform solutions that allow you to be more flexible and less conservative.
An example of this is game engines, now it is difficult to imagine a more or less high-quality game made without a game engine. So it will be with applications, a new player has appeared on the market - Flutter. Dart is a pretty nice language for Flutter development, unlike Java and Kotlin. I can’t say anything about Swift, at first glance the language is good, at least it almost supplanted Objective-C.
Native development requires a different codebase, after a few months it will be difficult to find the same places in ios and android code, this creates a big problem for users, because some features will be released on one platform before another.
Another issue is the back-end : if you don't want your users to feel uncomfortable while your developers are working hard to introduce features that are already integrated on another platform, then you will have to keep two versions of the API for each platform. This complicates development by an order of magnitude , ties your hands and slows you down.your business processes and you are wasting time, money and users, not right now, but in the long term, because The mobile market is not a sprint, but a marathon.