Non-Native Development Hit a New Peak!
This is a single insight from This Week in Apps - Non-Native Development is on the Rise. Check out the full article for more insights.
The native vs non-native development debate has been raging for years now.
On the one side, we have non-native frameworks like React Native and Flutter, which offer reactive cross-platform development. On the other, we have new frameworks from Apple and Google that aim to simplify the development process with a similar paradigm that's native and performant.
As Apple's and Google's solutions continue to mature, we'd expect to see a drop in the number of new app releases powered by React Native and Flutter.
Is that really the case?
No. Not really. Quite the opposite.
I used Appfigures Explorer to pull and analyze all new apps and games released every year since 2020, comparing the share of apps using Flutter, React Native, and native apps. I chose those two because they are the most popular development SDKs across both stores.
Going back to 2020, the data shows that new apps and games powerd by React Native or Flutter accounted for 7% of all app releases in the year. In more absolute terms, more than 125K apps and games using React Native and Flutter were released to the App Store and Google Play.
That figure grew to 12% in 2021, and fast forward to 2024, SDK usage data shows that 15% of new mobile apps and games were built using one of the two non-native frameworks.
All things considered, 15% is still a small number, but seeing it double within just a few years - all while Apple and Google are hard at work to simplify development with SwiftUI and Jetpack Compose, is certainly an interesting trend.
I took it a step further and looked at the revenue and downloads generated by these apps. In the last year, Appfigures Intelligence shows those apps generated nearly $8B in net revenue - what publishers keep after store fees - and 6B downloads. Those represent about 9% of all net revenue generated across the stores and 6% of all downloads.
Small but significant numbers, which I expect to increase significantly in 2025.
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All figures included in this report are estimated. Unless specified otherwise, estimated revenue is always net, meaning it's the amount the developer earned after Apple and Google took their fee.
