Is RN still used widely? Most people/companies I know have ditched it. It's never a time saver and usually just a pain once you wanna do something complicated.
It seems to be more and more a niche tool. I don't think there's really anything better for situations where you have a small startup that needs an app, has JS experience, but can't justify a full-time mobile dev for each platform. This is the situation I'm in now, at least, and despite a few warts I couldn't imagine anything better for getting some fairly high quality apps out the door.
Why don't you use ionic or a pwa? It is known that RN has an extreme impact on battery consumption, the web browser is much more efficient in terms of energy use...
Not familiar with Ionic, honestly, and React Native has been around a few years and supported all the use-cases we'd want, and I've been doing React for a number of years, so a familiar environment was a huge win.
Energy consumption is definitely a concern, but our app isn't exactly something people are going to be on all the time...it's more of a "check it a few times a day and move on" sort of deal. It's a fairly complex app with quite a few screens and with daily usage I haven't noticed any hit on battery life.
A PWA could be a good fit, and while I think there's many cases where it makes a lot of sense, there's a handful of native features we wanted to utilize (most importantly, push notifications!) that aren't possible yet in the PWA world.
There's always tradeoffs with any of these abstractions and React Native fit the bill with what we were comfortable trading off. I'd love to see the whole thing get the full native experience on iOS and Android once we're profitable and can hire full-time devs on those projects, but we're not there yet and so far the decision to go with RN has paid huge dividends in terms of shipping this. You'd be hard-pressed to tell it wasn't a native app, seriously!
