It's often times fine on iOS and then incredibly slow on Android. Hermes is very exciting but still requires many polyfills to make simple NPM packages work. I hope one day, the web (and embedding web apps on mobile) makes React Native fully obsolete.
We don't use Expo, either. It's very painless.
That's not what react native is for. Its for building native applications with a react-like syntax for the views. To me it seems like you used hammer to put in screws, no?
That's interesting though, I would've expected iOS to be slower with android largely leveraging chrome because Google.
The problem at the time was multifaceted. The devices couldn't handle it, the network couldn't handle it, and webkit was still relatively limited. But it did work. https://9to5mac.com/2021/06/03/remembering-apples-sweet-solu...
MacOS is getting there kind of lately with safari being able to turn web pages into apps. But there isn't really built in mechanisms for that: https://www.macrumors.com/2023/06/14/how-web-apps-work-macos...
The part about being slower is still true though.
People just don’t know it’s an option. And as you say, there are fewer native APIs available to it.
Performance isn’t incredible, but neither is the “native” app (95% sure it’s react native or similar), which frequently dips below 60fps.