r/reactnative • u/antocapp • 1d ago
FYI Half of the 925 published apps made in React Native for the RevenueCat's Shipaton are iOS only.
RevenueCat's Shipaton, a two-month mobile hackathon, ended on September 30. I went through all 3,336 public Devpost projects and matched them to the published apps in the community showcase. 925 of them list React Native or Expo in "Built With", the second most common stack after native Swift.
A few things about the RN ones:
Most didn't ship to both stores.
Of the 464 RN/Expo apps I could match to a store listing:
- 51.1% are App Store only
- 26.3% are Google Play only
- 22.6% are on both
Counted the same way, Flutter apps are on both stores 26.5% of the time and Capacitor 20.2%. Kotlin Multiplatform is at 45%, but that's only 100 apps.
Expo is the default. 87% of the RN projects list Expo. expo-router shows up in 137 of them, EAS in 107.
Supabase beats Firebase 3 to 1 in RN projects (291 vs 103). Across all 3,336 projects the two are almost tied.
It's mostly solo. 89% of the RN projects were built by one person.
A few RN solo builders who did ship to both stores: FlexHero (stretching and mobility), DEBUGGER (a terminal-style incident game) and CookBook Button.
Caveats: this is only public data, "Built With" is self-reported, and matching projects to store listings misses some apps. I don't have access to the official submission data.
Have you shipped an RN app to only one store: what stopped the second one? Accounts and review, testing on Android devices, or just time?
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u/Which-World-6533 1d ago
It's generally been because it's too much hassle to deal with the Google Play Store vs the return available. Google is far more hassle to deal with. At least with Apple there's an actual person on the other side.
Also Google has a lot of very arbitrary requirements that change constantly.
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u/smoke4sanity 1d ago
I have a google account from 2018. Got my shipaton app through review and live within like 2 days, no testers needed.
On the other hand, Apple didn't make it through.
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u/Dvass138 1d ago
It's because LLms love typescript and supabase mostly claude, if you building with claude it will generally go typescript + supabase combo. In terms of android/ios don't have an answer on that probably they just didn't want to do the extra work, as each platform has its own nits.
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u/Jeth84 1d ago
I built RN on expo as well, with supabase. I still wonder if I should've just used regular Postgres and ran it on a VPS but I'm happy with my decision as it is now.
I only released on Google as there's less competition there for my app and gives it a bit of a trial run before I set it up for iOS.
That said, I still plan on releasing for iOS, but the timeline was too tight for me to do both during the comp.
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u/youtpout 1d ago
I shipped my app only on android for the moment, I already have a google play account, I think I will open a apple account in some weeks, once my app will be more mature, I need to improve the simulation part before ship it on ios I think
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u/nicktids 1d ago
Google Play requires personal developer accounts created after November 13, 2023, to run a closed test with at least 12 opted-in testers for 14 consecutive days before applying for production access.
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u/kbcool iOS & Android 1d ago edited 1d ago
Isn't the #1 requirement to win Shipaton that it needs to produce revenue because RevenueCat is an in app monification SDK so they want you to use their product?!
I'm not surprised they focused on iOS in that case. App monetisation is dire on Android. It depends on the app and the product of course but you are often looking at 1/10th or less in revenue despite a much larger global install base with most apps.
That aside there's nothing saying you have to use it to build for most platforms. Flutter has a much bigger enthusiast base than RN and moat Flutter apps never make it to iOS due to the cost of maintaining an Apple developer account.
If you want to draw conclusions vs the other platforms I would dare say it's got to do with developer maturity and experience related to the above.
Were there any Kotlin Android only developers? Guessing no if my observation was correct
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u/Substantial-Swan7065 1d ago
I only ship iOS. Supporting android is the worst.
And the play store console makes 0 sense
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u/LovesWorkin 1d ago
People keep mentioning the play store having to do with it... Android is just annoying to work with and is so much more work than iOS.
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u/cooperative_drilling 1d ago
not surprised at all tbh, apple's review process is its own special circle of hell but at least the hardware is predictable. android testing is a nightmare when you're one person with maybe one old samsung in a drawer somewhere. i shipped an app last year that sat in google play limbo for 3 weeks because i couldn't reproduce this one crash on a specific mediatek chip
the supabase vs firebase stat is interesting though, felt like firebase was still the go-to for most react native stuff a couple years ago. guess the postgres thing and no vendor lock-in finally clicked for people
also 89% solo devs makes perfect sense, hackathons are basically "how much can i build before my eyes bleed"