Multiplatform App Development With React Native

Mo frames multiplatform development as a way to balance scope, cost, and time: building separate apps for each platform takes more effort or forces teams to reduce features. React Native brought declarative UI development to native apps, while earlier projects explored sharing visual components across web and mobile. On an e-commerce project in 2018, Mo’s team shared business logic, API calls, styling primitives, and design tokens, but kept the visual components separate because they had concerns about SEO and server-side rendering.

Mo describes a range of approaches, from separate native apps to sharing business logic, selected UI components, or nearly the whole application. What makes sense depends on the product: sharing navigation and components can work, while web and mobile layouts may need to differ. Even with a universal app, platform-specific libraries and behaviors may require separate implementations behind shared APIs.

Mo’s team had three months to deliver mobile and web for a streaming service, with TV planned for later. About 12 or 13 developers worked in a monorepo that included frontend and backend code, shared types, and packages for independent development. The team chose Tamagui for cross-platform styling and shared layouts to meet the deadline, while noting that the library’s documentation slowed them down.

The team checked video player support early, including DRM, accessibility, and HLS or DASH protocols. A library described as supporting web and mobile might not support a required feature on every platform, so they used abstraction layers where needed. For a project spanning web, mobile, and three TV platforms, they tailored tests by development stage and ran Flashlight performance checks nightly.

The team chose Metro across platforms to reduce setup overhead and meet the deadline, keeping packages isolated so they could move web to Next.js later. Web bundle size became a challenge: it reached 10 or 11 MB uncompressed, then fell to around 4 MB, below 1 MB compressed, after manual optimizations. Mo recommends monitoring bundle size and sees Metro as a fit for mobile-first projects with tight timelines, while SEO and web performance may favor Next.js.