react-native VS NativeScript

React Native’s 2025 architecture introduces Fabric, TurboModules, and JSI for faster performance and smoother development. By removing the legacy bridge, it enables quicker rendering and efficient native integration. Developers benefit from improved tools, crash handling, and native module access. This upgrade makes React Native a robust, future-ready choice for mobile app development.

Introduction In 2025, startups face a critical decision when choosing their mobile development framework. The React Native vs Flutter debate continues to dominate discussions among entrepreneurs and developers alike. Both frameworks offer compelling advantages for cross-platform development, but which one truly serves startups better in today's competitive landscape?

Cross-platform development means writing code once and running it on multiple platforms like iOS and Android. This reduces time, cost, and effort compared to developing separate apps for each platform. Developers use frameworks to simplify this process, and two of the most popular are Flutter and React Native.

If you’re upgrading from React Native 0.79, it’s worth reviewing the RN 0.79 release notes before diving in.

The final RN 0.80 version comes with fresh React 19.1.0 (0e11e6a28b)! This brings improvements like "owner stacks" to help identify which component caused a specific error (although there's a known bug if you use the @babel/plugin-transform-function-name plugin).

This course was great for me because one, it was made within the last year (at the time I took the course anyway). It seemed anything older than this had out-of-date information (using an older version of React Native) and it would throw me off when I encountered something that wasn't done using the more recent versions of React Native/Expo.

React Native Official Docs

Stricter Imports: With the introduction of "exports" in package.json (319ba0afd2, 9fc2a9b9e6), importing from internal folders (e.g., react-native/Libraries/...) may no longer work. Stick to official paths! Direct imports from react-native/virtualized-lists are now blocked (be8393c41b).

Tela de Boas-Vindas Renovada: A NewAppScreen (aquela tela padrão) foi redesenhada e movida para react-native/new-app-screen (3cf0102007).

NativeScript

NativeScript is a good example of a runtime built specifically for cross-platform native mobile application development built using JavaScript.

This is not so much the Svelte equivalent of React Native as it is just NativeScript (https://nativescript.org).

There is also https://nativescript.org/ which would allow you to use Vue (or several other frameworks) to build a mobile app. Used it myself a while back for an iPad app using Vue 2 and it was pretty straightforward. It seems like there have been quite a few improvements since then so might be worth a look.

Anyone who thinks this sucks should try NativeScript with hassle-free update experience, quick build time, HMR, direct access to native apis, use React Native plugins and more. Pick any style you like - vanilla, Angular, Vue, React, Svelte - and easily add some SwiftUI and Jetpack Compose views if you want a and connect it to your JS. Docs are a bit behind at the moment but a major update is in progress. https://nativescript.org/

There are layers that offer access to native APIs like capacitor, cordova and nativescript. Apparently sometimes multiple of them should be used, but I didn't understand what are the differences even after reading the announcement. These seem to be frontend agnostic technologies and Capacitor is apparently the more modern choice at the moment.

Maintaining NativeScript core is like maintaining any TypeScript library. In particular, it's maintenance revolves largely around:

PWA? You can then, with moderate difficulty use something like https://nativescript.org/ make native versions.

Using the amazing Preview environment that the Nativescript team together with Stackblitz have done, it was time to start hacking at it. (More information can be found here at https://preview.nativescript.org/)