Non-Native Development Trends - Will React Native's New Architecture Take the Lead Away from Flutter?

Meta has recently released the New Architecture for React Native, a project that started back in 2018 to make React Native faster and smoother by enabling synchronous communication between its code and the native code - what non-native development is most criticized for lacking.

The debate between native and non-native app development has been raging for years, but that hasn't stopped developers from leveraging React Native and other non-native frameworks to produce apps at an increasing rate.

According to our SDKs leaderboard, React Native is now the #1 non-native framework on the App Store and 2nd on Google Play following the native alternatives (Swift and Kotlin). Looking at apps released this year, this makes a lot of sense.

That's what apps currently on the App Store and Google Play are using right now, but there's another interesting view I look at when asked if it's worth going native or not:

Based on our SDK intelligence, a little under 7% of all apps released so far in 2024 (Jan - Oct) use React Native. Rival Flutter is at 11%. Both have grown their share over the last few years while all other competitors have been on the decline.

React Native's share rose from 4.73% in 2022 to 6.75% so far in 2024 while Flutter's rose from 10.15% to 11.07%, respectively.

Unity, Cordova, and Ionic's numbers are all down, which means either developers are moving to native development more or developers are choosing RN or Flutter for their non-native development instead of the others.

Comparing the share of native apps, which actually went down by a smidge, I believe it's the latter - the market is focusing on React Native and Flutter, and that's pretty big.

Yes, I know Unity is only for games which are a smaller category than apps. I chose to include it because its share is large enough.

I haven't seen the new architecture in action just yet but expect that if performance is what Meta is focusing on it'll happen. And that leads me to believe more developers will find this update exciting and increase the rate of development even more, maybe even taking over Flutter.

But wait, where's the money?

You didn't think I'd do an analysis like this and not look at the more important side of apps - making money, right?

I rounded up all apps (and even games) currently using React Native and Flutter, the two clear winners of the pack, and analyzed their revenue. We estimate that together, apps using React Native and Flutter generated $570M of net revenue, what developers keep after Apple's and Google's fees, in the last 30 days.

Which framework powered more revenue? I can tell you if I didn't see these numbers first I'd guess differently, but to my surprise, the two were nearly equal. Our estimates show React Native was responsible for $287M while Flutter for $283M.

And the distribution was pretty even between the two across all revenue levels.

Our estimates show that 790 React Native apps generated between $10K and $100K of net revenue, 255 generated between $100K and $1M and 173 generated $1M+ - and that's all net revenue, which is what the developers get to take home after fees.

The figures are almost identical, though a teeny tiny bit lower for Flutter with 727, 241, and 37, respectively.

Non-native development is here to stay and this race is pretty tight. Can React Native take over with the new architecture? We'll have to wait and see.