AppVion Studio
Insights
Choosing a framework
Most comparisons of these two frameworks are written by people who sell one of them. This one is written by a studio that builds Kotlin Multiplatform products and has shipped against React Native teams. The honest summary is that they share different things, and the right answer depends on one question about your product rather than on which framework is newer.
The short answer
That single sentence explains almost every practical difference between them, including cost, hiring, performance and the kind of bug you will spend your evenings on.
React Native shares
Kotlin Multiplatform shares
What that costs you
React Native gives you one interface to build and one to maintain, which is genuinely fast. The price is that your screens are written in JavaScript and React Native turns them into native views at runtime, so every native capability arrives through a library someone else maintains.
Kotlin Multiplatform gives you two interfaces to build. The price is real. What you get back is that the interface is the platform’s own, and the rules that decide whether an invoice is correct exist exactly once.
Where each one breaks
Both frameworks work. Both have a characteristic way of going wrong, and knowing which one you can live with matters more than any benchmark.
Where React Native struggles
Where Kotlin Multiplatform struggles
The honest version
If your app is mostly screens, forms and a server that does the thinking, React Native will get you there faster and cheaper, and the compromises may never bite.
If your app makes decisions on the device, works when the signal drops, or leans on hardware, Kotlin Multiplatform puts the difficult code in one place and leaves the platform to do what it is good at.
A decision rule
Question one
Not “does it cache” — does a user complete real work with no signal, and does that work reconcile later? If yes, lean Kotlin Multiplatform. Offline-first means conflict rules, sync state and a local database, and those are exactly what you do not want written twice.
Question two
If a mis-calculated price, a missed approval or a wrong dispatch costs real money or safety, share the logic. If the worst case is a cosmetic bug, that pressure is absent and React Native is a reasonable call.
Question three
A React team that will own this app forever is a strong argument for React Native. A team that will hand it to mobile engineers, or no in-house team at all, is an argument for the platform’s own languages, where hiring is easier and knowledge is not framework-specific.
Question four
Many operational apps are Android-only for years, because the field hardware is Android. If that is you, the comparison dissolves: build native Android now and structure it so the domain layer can move into a shared module later, without a rewrite.
What we use, and why
Our work is operational: dispatch, approvals, attendance, proof of delivery, field service. That category answers question one and question two the same way almost every time — the app must work without signal, and a wrong record is expensive. So the shared-logic model fits, and that is why we build the way we do.
D. Delivery is a three-app Kotlin Multiplatform logistics platform with realtime dispatch, payments and offline-first sync — the clearest example of why the line sits where it does. PropFix applies the same structure to property maintenance and field work orders.
If you describe your product and it turns out React Native is the right tool for it, you will get that answer straight. It is a cheaper thing to hear now than in month five. Our pricing page publishes real numbers, including what a clarity sprint costs if you want the decision documented before committing to a build.
FAQ
Neither is better in general, and anyone who says otherwise is selling something. They share different things. React Native shares the user interface and renders it itself, which is fastest when the app is mostly screens and forms and one team owns both platforms. Kotlin Multiplatform shares the business logic and keeps each interface genuinely native, which wins when correctness matters, when the app is offline-first, or when it uses hardware heavily.
Yes. Kotlin Multiplatform has been stable since November 2023, and Google officially supports it for sharing business logic between Android and iOS. It runs in production at large engineering organisations, and at smaller studios shipping multi-role operational platforms with realtime dispatch, payments and offline sync.
React Native is usually cheaper for a first version, because one team writes one interface. Kotlin Multiplatform is usually cheaper across a two to three year life, because the rules that cause expensive bugs exist once rather than twice, and you do not accumulate a backlog of platform workarounds in the interface layer. If the app will be rewritten in eighteen months either way, that long-run argument does not apply and you should take the cheaper first version.
Yes, but not incrementally in the way an Android-to-KMP migration can be. A React Native app shares its interface, so moving to KMP means rewriting the interface natively on each platform while the business rules move into a shared Kotlin module. Plan it as a rebuild that reuses your backend, not as a refactor, and be honest about whether the reason justifies it.
Yes. The shared Kotlin module compiles to a native framework that Swift and SwiftUI consume like any other dependency. The iOS interface is written in Swift, so it behaves like a native iOS app rather than a port. This is the part people find surprising: KMP does not put a Kotlin interface on iOS, and is not trying to.
Flutter sits on the same side of the line as React Native: it shares the interface. Unlike React Native, it does not use the platform’s own views; it draws every control itself with its own rendering engine. Every native capability still arrives through a plugin, and the four questions above apply to Flutter unchanged.
Start the conversation
Bring the product, the platforms you need, and the constraints. Fifteen minutes is usually enough to answer the four questions above — and if the answer is that you do not need us, you will get that straight.