Looking at React Native in 2025

Back in 2015 and 2018 I wrote a small trilogy of posts about NativeScript, React Native, and what I dubbed the "MobileNativeJavaScript" (MNJS) movement. Basically, using JavaScript to build native mobile apps (a term that to my never ending chagrin never took off). At the time I was mostly skeptical: the tooling was fragile, the UI story was awkward, and every framework demo seemed carefully…