React Native was introduced in 2015 and its popularity has been growing ever since. Over these 4 years, this solution has gained many supporters and also has helped startups and businesses reduce development costs. One of the most common discussions in the world of mobile development is about the native with vs. cross-platform approach comparison. 

This article is based on our own experience at Read4S and shows the influence of react-native on the reduction of app development costs in comparison to native development.


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App Development Costs

The budget for the project should be prepared for some circumstances. Namely, each stage of the project and all costs that come with each one: design, development, testing, release, and management. Generally, development generates the highest cost.

However, if you want to create a mobile app for iOS and Android using the native approach, you certainly must include the costs of two separate teams in the budget. One of them would be working on the native iOS app and the other one on the native Android app. Thanks to this approach, you can take advantage of all the best features from each platform. At the same time, both teams work simultaneously to developt a product that will have identical features that work the same way even though they are meant for two different platforms., iOS and Android. Certainly, this is not an easy task and it requires additional time for analysis in the project.


On the other hand, there are cross-platform solutions that require only one mobile development team. In such an approach, developers are responsible for providing apps for both platforms using tools or frameworks like React Native. Using the same codebase for iOS and Android makes it possible in some cases to reduce the development time almost twice. It also means that any changes or maintenance will be done faster and smoother.

And this answers the headline question of this article on how to reduce app development costs using React native?

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Advantages of using React Native

  • Faster development – using a common codebase reduces the required project time as the user interface (UI) and all functionalities are created only once. Moreover, with lower maintenance costs, the entire development is more developer-friendly.

  • High performance – the fact that the framework was created by developers at Facebook, guarantees that this solution is of the best performance, even if the apps are not developed the native way.

  • Shared design – when the project is developed in React Native, one design is created which can be easily used for both platforms. Also, the same UX and UI for both platforms significantly reduce the overall project costs.

  • Lower operational cost – making cross-platform apps reduces overall project management costs. Unlike in the case of native apps development, there is only one team that provides the app to both stores, App Store and Google Play.
  • Easy app deployment – the framework makes it easy to build versions for both platforms and release them quickly.

Conclusion

When planning which type of mobile app development method to choose, one should consider React Native as a good way to reduce costs. Using this mobile application framework saves up to 40% of the time and spends less budget on the development process. Based on our own experience, creating small and medium projects in React Native is really efficient and it turns out to be a big competition for the native development. At Ready4s, we combine both development approaches to provide each client with the best solution.