A new State of React Native survey shows that the long-awaited new architecture, which was declared stable last year, remains a pain point for many developers.

This year’s survey ran from December 2024 to January 2025, and attracted 3501 responses, up from 2400 the previous year, suggesting that interest and usage is growing. 20 percent of respondents have apps with more than 100,000 users, up from 14 percent last year.

“The new architecture was marketed as ‘almost ready’ for about 6 years. Now that it is finally considered stable, we have not been able to use it due to instability and regressions in functionality,” said one respondent.

Software Mansion, the development company where the creator of the survey Bartłomiej Bukowski is a software engineer, said that despite problems the new architecture has seen “almost 50 percent adoption,” though library compatibility is a major matter. According to fellow software engineers Jakub Piasecki & Wojciech Lewicki, the compatibility layers are “improving with each release,” and expect significant improvement in the course of this year.

Wary onlookers though may feel that the uncertain progress of the new architecture confirms suspicions that React Native is only suitable for developers willing to accept some extra work navigating tricky issues, compared to more mature frameworks.

The debugging experience is further evidence of this. The top debugging tool is the console API, with one comment being that “due to the debugger being broken for most of the history of react-native we’ve been forced into using console as our primary debugging tool. This is very painful.”

React Native Dev Tools, introduced with version 0.76 in October 2024, uses the Chrome Dev Tools protocol, but have had a mixed reception. “The first debugger to actually work properly in the history of React Native,” said one respondent; but others complained of missing developer panels and network tools, lack of profiling, along with a lack of integration with Visual Studio Code (VS Code).

Better debugging is the top developer request in the survey, cited by 54 percent of respondents.

Despite these challenges, 88 percent of respondents feel that React Native is moving in the right direction. The open source Expo framework, which targets Android, iOS and the web, is highly rated as an advantage over other solutions.

Most React Native developers target Android and iOS, with just 22 percent also targeting web, and little interest in desktop applications for macOS or Windows – despite Microsoft’s use of React Native for its own cross-platform development.

It is also notable that only 20 percent of respondents use Windows. 74 percent run macOS and 6 percent Linux.

Concluding the report, Bukowski considers that the emergence of Expo as the primary framework, the arrival of the new architecture, and the introduction of React Server Components are all “substantial advancements” which promise a strong future for React Native.

If React usage continues to grow for web applications, interest in React Native is also likely to increase, as developers use their existing skills to target and share code with mobile applications that need access to platform APIs.