A shortlist in 72 hours, contributing inside two weeks, and a 30-day guarantee if the fit is wrong.
72-hour shortlist · 30-day replacement guarantee · Month-to-month
The promise is one codebase, two platforms, half the cost. It’s directionally true and it undersells the work that remains.
Roughly 80% of a React Native app is genuinely shared. The remaining 20% is where projects stall: native module integration, platform-specific permissions, push notification setup that differs on each OS, and performance on the low-end Android devices your analytics say a third of your users are on.
Then there’s store submission. App Store rejections are routine, often opaque, and each round trip costs a week. A developer who has never submitted an app will treat this as an afterthought and discover otherwise at the worst possible moment.
The developers worth hiring are the ones who’ve been through a rejection and know what triggers them. That experience isn’t visible on a CV and it’s the single best predictor of whether your launch date holds.
Bridging to Swift or Kotlin when a JavaScript library doesn't exist. The clearest line between mid and senior on this stack.
Have they shipped to both stores? Have they been rejected, and what for? A developer who has handled review feedback is worth a premium.
List rendering, image handling, and memory on devices that aren't a recent flagship. Most performance complaints come from this segment.
Knowing when Expo's constraints will bite and when they won't. Choosing wrong costs an ejection halfway through the project.
Local persistence, sync conflict handling, and notification setup across both platforms. Commonly required, commonly underestimated.
A live conversation in English, every time.
Mobile mistakes cost more than web mistakes for one structural reason: you can’t hotfix your way out. A bad web deploy is reverted in minutes. A bad release sits in review for days.
The concrete version is a launch that slips a month on rejections nobody planned for. Guideline 5.1.1 wants a privacy policy and a reason for every permission you request. 4.2 rejects apps judged too thin to warrant being an app. Sign-in with Apple is required if you offer other third-party logins. None of these are hard to satisfy — they’re only expensive when you learn about them after submitting, because each rejection costs a review cycle, and you cannot buy your way to the front of that queue.
The other recurring cost is Android performance discovered too late. The app is built and tested on recent iPhones. It ships. Then the reviews arrive from users on three-year-old mid-range Android hardware, where an unoptimised list drops frames and the app is judged unusable. Fixing that after launch means reworking rendering in screens that are already built.
A developer who has shipped to both stores prices this in from day one. They ask about your lowest supported device before they ask about your design system.
Mid-level (3–5 years). Builds screens and features against an existing app architecture. Comfortable with navigation, state, and API integration. Needs help with native modules and release process.
Senior (5–8 years). Sets up the app architecture, handles native bridging, owns the release pipeline, and debugs platform-specific issues without escalating.
Lead (8+ years). Owns mobile direction, makes the React Native versus native call honestly, handles store relationships and release strategy.
New app builds. Zero to launch. Usually needs a senior who can set the architecture, plus mid-level capacity underneath.
Adding mobile to an existing web product. Common with SaaS. The web team’s React knowledge helps less than people expect — see hire React developers for where the two diverge.
Migration from Flutter or native. Needs someone who has done a migration, not just used both. Worth comparing Flutter, iOS and Android honestly before committing either way.
Store rejection rescue. An app stuck in review with a deadline approaching. Short, focused, and worth paying for experience.
Performance work. An app that’s janky on mid-range Android. Usually a one-to-two month engagement. Related: web and mobile applications.
Week one. They get the app building on both platforms — which, on an existing codebase, is itself a real test. Native dependencies, signing certificates, provisioning profiles, and a Gradle configuration nobody has touched in a year. Expect questions about your Expo or bare workflow, your minimum supported OS versions, and who holds the developer accounts. A good hire asks about store account access in week one, because verification delays are a classic launch blocker.
Weeks two to four. They ship a screen or feature to a test build on both platforms and get it into TestFlight or internal testing. Expect them to flag at least one platform divergence you hadn’t accounted for — a permission prompt that behaves differently, a keyboard avoiding view that only misbehaves on Android, a font rendering inconsistency.
The warning sign is a developer testing only on the simulator. Simulators hide performance problems entirely; they run on your laptop’s processor. If nobody has put a build on a real mid-range Android handset by week three, you have no information about how the app actually performs.
Ask about the release, not only the build. Shipping to the App Store and Play Store involves signing, provisioning, staged rollout, and review rejections that have nothing to do with code quality. A developer who has been through several releases raises these in week one; one who has not discovers them the week you planned to launch.
Choosing Expo or bare workflow without checking the native requirement first. Expo is excellent and covers most apps. It becomes a problem when you discover in month three that you need a native SDK with no config plugin — Bluetooth peripherals and some payment terminals are the usual culprits. Decide by listing every native integration you need before writing code, not after.
Assuming a React developer can do React Native. The language and component model are shared. Navigation, gestures, native modules, build tooling, and the release process are not. A strong web React developer typically needs six to eight weeks to become genuinely productive, and that ramp is invisible if nobody plans for it.
Leaving store accounts to the end. Apple Developer Program enrolment for an organisation needs a D-U-N-S number and can take over a week. Teams routinely finish the app and then wait on paperwork. Start it in week one; it costs nothing to have it ready early.
Treating the two platforms as one deliverable. Shared code does not mean shared behaviour. Keyboard handling, navigation gestures, permissions dialogs, and background execution all differ, and a build only ever tested on one platform will surface those differences to your users rather than to your team. Insist on both from the first sprint rather than at the end.
Rates depend on seniority, platform depth, and engagement length. Tell us the role and we’ll give you a firm number.
Tell us the role and we will send a shortlist within 72 hours.
Tell Us the RoleTell us the role. Three to five profiles within 72 hours.