Having run through an app building exercise myself, and starting to shepherd coworkers through the same exercise, my feeling about it is the same as it was for earlier platforms (like Appcelerator) that I tried: good for certain classes of application that are mainly built around text, lists, and UI logic; weak for performance demanding areas like games. React native brings a nice dev pipeline to app development and speeds development for a lot of garden variety app development tasks, making it a real advance for prototyping or rapid iteration; it doesn't bring anything that's going to unseat native app development where native is strongest, in drawing intensive tasks.
It's still early exploration for me, so I might change my mind on this, but I'm not expecting RN to be a game-changer. Definitely useful, but not really going to upend anything.
In the real world of contract software and digital agencies, RN has been a game changer over the last year.
Mobile app projects under $20k are definitely react native. It also makes mobile app projects at the $10k level now viable. At the $40k level it'll be a tough choice, with the fact that the project wants to reuse parts for a web app being the clincher.
The other obvious reality is of course that RN isn't meant for 3D, games, or so on. But that's been the understanding from the get go. What started out as replication of whatever UI components that the first and second class FB apps were making use of has now grown into a community that covers many, many different UI cases.
RN is pushing Swift, ObjC, and Java engineers upwards to focus on the upper end but it's wiping out the bottom by letting the web devs into the mobile devs world.
At my employer I can easily imagine deploying react native apps for a variety of uses, especially as we do service design : being able to run real experiments with, say, gov't services with real apps or companies looking for mobile assist on new service offerings is a huge win.
At the same time, I'm sceptical that RN has escaped the earlier performance ghettos of Appcelerator, Phonegap et al., which aren't just in games, but also in complicated UIs with a lot of elements. On building a simple sudoku app, I ran into noticeable micro-lag that seems to come from overuse of Views to structure the grid--and noticeably, the performance was better on a non-retina device, causing me to remember the swamp that Java's AWT got caught in with its 'native peering' arrangement, namely that cumulative overhead killed performance in virtually all non-toy cases. React's virtual DOM is an obvious plus in the browser; I'm not so sure where native apps are concerned.
Agreed -- if you're doing audio/video effects, or making a non-trivial video game, you'll probably want to be writing in C++ (and on Android, using the NDK).
React Native is definitely more aimed at applications that tend to use the typical mobile UI controls, rather than games. If you're building a 2D or 3D mobile game and you want to get the cross-platform efficiency of React Native, you might want to check out Unity instead.
It's still early exploration for me, so I might change my mind on this, but I'm not expecting RN to be a game-changer. Definitely useful, but not really going to upend anything.