What Developers Really Think About React Native: Top Pain Points & Preferred Alternatives
A recent State of React Native survey of over 1,800 developers reveals three major pain points—upgrade difficulty, debugging challenges, and performance issues—while highlighting SwiftUI and Jetpack Compose as the most favored alternatives and offering insights into emerging state‑management libraries.
Two months ago the unofficial React Native community launched the "State of React Native" questionnaire to better understand developers' challenges with the framework and their choices of alternative tools.
The survey results show that most respondents identify three major pain points:
Difficulty upgrading versions
Inconvenient debugging of errors
Insufficient performance
More than half also point out two serious problems: unmaintained packages and excessive reliance on third‑party libraries.
Kacper Kapuściak, a Software Mansion engineer and initiator of the survey, explains that maintaining React Native requires knowledge of three or more programming languages as well as iOS and Android APIs, making the work inherently complex, especially as mobile platforms update frequently and many bridge modules become obsolete.
The most popular alternative frameworks among React Native developers are SwiftUI and Jetpack Compose , while Ionic , Xamarin and Apache Cordova are less favored. Interestingly, despite lower overall preference, Cordova has the highest usage rate, followed closely by Ionic.
Among emerging client‑side state libraries, Zustand , Jotai and Legend State attract interest but have relatively low adoption, while Redux remains the most popular, second only to the built‑in Hooks.
On the server‑side, TanStack Query and Apollo perform similarly, though developers are less likely to reuse Apollo in future projects.
Overall, while React Native still has many areas for improvement, respondents are generally satisfied with the framework’s complexity, development speed, and moderate evolution.
This is the first State of React Native report, gathering over 1,800 responses. Organizer Bartłomiej Bukowski notes that developers often struggle to decide which solutions to adopt, and hopes that this comparative data will help them make better technology choices.
Full report: https://results.stateofreactnative.com/
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Programmer DD
A tinkering programmer and author of "Spring Cloud Microservices in Action"
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