Software Mansion's React Native vs Swift and Kotlin: How We Choose the Stack
Original post React Native vs Swift and Kotlin: How We Choose the Stack
Article Summary
Michał Skałka from Software Mansion reveals the framework decision that saved Gobi's 120 FPS vision. The answer? It wasn't what they started with.
Software Mansion shares their battle-tested framework for choosing between React Native, native development, or hybrid approaches. Drawing from real projects like Gobi (migrated from RN to native), Filament (stayed RN with targeted native modules), and SeaPeople (fixed without changing stacks), they lay out exactly when each approach makes sense.
Key Takeaways
- Gobi migrated from React Native to native Swift/Kotlin to achieve 120 FPS performance
- Filament cut Android cold start from 6-10 seconds to 800ms staying in React Native
- Five decision questions: scope, bottlenecks, features, roadmap, and team capacity
- React islands let teams migrate gradually while shipping new features
The right mobile stack depends on your product's core interactions, performance needs, and team capabilities, not industry trends or default choices.
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What This Article Covers
On an iPhone 13, SeaPeople's app pushed CPU usage up to 170% and kept the crash-free rate stuck at just 95%. The cause was poor background task handling combined with the screen re-rendering every second.
Software Mansion kept the existing React Native stack and fixed the code itself, tackling the re-render loop and cleaning up how background tasks were managed.
CPU usage fell from 170% down to 30%, and the crash-free rate climbed to about 99%. At the same time, a two-person team managed to ship a new Groups feature in just two weeks.
This page summarizes “React Native vs Swift and Kotlin: How We Choose the Stack” by Software Mansion, published Nov 5, 2026. All credit for the original work goes to the authors.
