React Native + Expo lets you ship an iOS and Android app from a single codebase, maintained by a single team. In practice, 85 to 95% of the code is shared between the two platforms: you write each screen once, fix each bug once, and publish to the App Store and Google Play in parallel. The result: development time and maintenance cost cut in half compared to two separate native apps, without sacrificing the experience for the vast majority of products.
One codebase, one team, two stores
With native, you maintain two projects in parallel: a Swift app for iOS and a Kotlin app for Android. Two teams, two backlogs, twice as many bugs to reproduce and fix. React Native flips the logic: a single TypeScript/React codebase drives both platforms, with components built on real native UI elements. A feature developed on Monday is available on iOS and Android the same day.
What Expo brings, concretely
- Zero config: no Xcode or Android Studio to wrestle with to get started — the environment is ready in minutes.
- Over-the-air updates: push a fix straight to users without going back through store review.
- Native APIs ready to use: camera, push notifications, biometrics, geolocation, in-app payments.
- Cloud builds (EAS): generate signed iOS and Android binaries without a local macOS machine.
- A mature ecosystem, used in production by apps with millions of users.
The limits: where it strains
React Native is not magic. Some apps have needs that cross-platform handles poorly, or less well than fully native development. The cases to watch:
- Compute- or render-heavy work: 3D games, video editing, real-time augmented reality.
- Cutting-edge or highly platform-specific hardware features, shipped before React Native supports them.
- Custom native modules: as soon as you have to write Swift or Kotlin, you lose part of the single-team benefit.
- Extreme performance constraints on complex animations, where every millisecond counts.
When to prefer native
Native stays the right call when the platform is the product: an app that lives and dies on its graphics performance, advanced sensors, or deep system integration. For a AAA game, a video-creation tool, or an app that taps the very latest OS APIs on launch day, two native codebases are justified. For everything else — mobile SaaS, marketplace, business app, social network, B2B tool — React Native + Expo covers 90% of real needs with no visible compromise.
Writing each screen twice only makes sense when the platform is the product. Otherwise, you are paying twice for the same result.
What it changes for your V1
A single codebase also means a single budget and a single timeline. That is why Khufu builds its mobile apps on React Native, Expo and NestJS: a genuinely publishable V1 on the App Store and Google Play, delivered in 7 days for a fixed price of €15,000, source code yours. You validate your market on both platforms at once, then grow the product with a monthly maintenance budget (from €1,490/month) — without ever maintaining two duplicate apps.