If mobile is at all critical to your business, then you build in native - period.
I think we've all learned at least that much in the past few years.
A lot of businesses either overestimate or underestimate their mobile product needs because they don't understand the market or the platform. Expectations for an interactive consumer mobile app (Ride-sharing, Social media, Photo editing, etc) are extremely high and it would be foolish to under-invest or try to take shortcuts. At the same time there are ton of businesses (Home listings, Saas tools, Informational apps, etc) that would be well served by a simple React Native app. Know which type of business you are.
Performance critical, for sure, but in more areas than you think: My 2012 thinkpad (i5-3320M) maxes out 100% one of it's CPU while I type on facebook messenger.
If you're doing anything super gestural, with lots of complex animations and transitions, you'll inevitably have to drop down into native to get the interactions right. So it's about more than just performance though that is a big part of it too.
There are two new app only banks here in Switzerland and they both use a cross platform framework. One for sure ionic. On Android these apps are absolute garbage. They are slow to start, slow interaction and slow animation. One of these apps has a main.js in it that has over 200k lines of crap with hundreds of lines of if (ios) and if (android). All the iOS styles are packed in the Android apk which is just stupid.
If these banks want to compete with revolut or transferwise they need to provide an app that's isn't garbage.
My local bank has a native app as far as I can tell and it regularly takes over 10 seconds to get past the login page. My credit card (Discover) app somehow won an award for best UX in the industry and still takes over 5 seconds to log in (both of these are with Face ID by the way).
Contrast this to Robinhood, which jumps from cold boot to main screen in about a second.
The problem is not the frameworks, it is poor development practices. Until the big guys learn that outsourcing critical software is a stupid idea, the next generation cool kid apps will continue to eat at their customer base (until they become relevant enough to be bought out by the big guys, and the cycle repeats).
There is a difference between mission-critical and critical for the business.
For an entity like Snapchat, it is the business. It'd be stupid for them to even think of trying to cut corners to save a few bucks by maybe sharing some code.
Not saying you are wrong at all - building something with highly complex interactions, real time image manipulation etc. such as Snapchat would likely require dropping down to native code for a good part of it - but “maybe sharing some code” isn’t really fair - in my experience, React Native allows you to share the vast majority of code (aside from any native bits, of course).
We’ve built a pretty complex and highly visual music learning app for iOS and Android recently, and thanks to the combination of React Native, Unity and JUCE (C++ audio framework), pretty much all the code is shared. Seeing it run on Android with no big changes needed (aside from audio stuff, which is a challenge on Android in general) for the first time was pretty impressive. Even given unlimited resources, I’m not sure I’d choose to go down the 2 native apps route - automatic feature parity across platforms is a pretty killer feature.
If you were building something like Snapchat where I guess things like app startup time and performance on budget devices are important, I can see why you’d choose to though.
I think we've all learned at least that much in the past few years.
A lot of businesses either overestimate or underestimate their mobile product needs because they don't understand the market or the platform. Expectations for an interactive consumer mobile app (Ride-sharing, Social media, Photo editing, etc) are extremely high and it would be foolish to under-invest or try to take shortcuts. At the same time there are ton of businesses (Home listings, Saas tools, Informational apps, etc) that would be well served by a simple React Native app. Know which type of business you are.