Your question is kind of all over the place so let me respond to its parts individually.
What is the future of React Native, Android, and iOS development?
I believe the immediate future (~5-10 years) is bright for all 3 of these technologies. However, my guess is that only 2 of the 3 will be relevant in the long run. Let me explain.
The goal of iOS, Android, and RN is to deliver mobile experiences (apps) to the front-end users. iOS & Android require app developers to onboard to their respective platforms and build out apps/experiences using platform-specific code, i.e. Kotlin/Java on Android and Obj-C/Swift on iOS. When done right, the developers can extract the most out of both platforms and deliver the best possible experiences to their users. If you’re a company who wants to offer AAA titles on both platforms, you need to invest in resources that can expertly operate in both environments. This can get very expensive because you now need to maintain 2 different platform stacks, each with its own engineering and support resources. There is some room for resource sharing but because each platform offers exclusive features to their users (e.g. wearables, widgets, headless, automotive, etc), if you go fully native, you (the company) have to develop and maintain de facto two separate products. Enter, React Native.
React Native flips the native paradigm on its head. Instead of delivering state-of-the-art experiences that are expensive to develop, it aims at the lowest common denominator of features between iOS and Android. All the while, making them cheaper to develop on the premise that Javascript developers are easier to find than native developers. But by choosing RN, you (the company) also have to lower your bar by opting out of exclusive, platform-specific features that make the native experiences special. Though your spending goes down with it. There’s also the performance cost your users have to incur by having a single-threaded message funnel between the JS and native layers. RN is working on this particular performance problem right now (single-threaded model), but I don’t think any of it is going to relevant in the long run.
What makes native (iOS/Android) development so unattractive to companies is the cost. As mentioned earlier, it’s expensive to feed and nurture a dedicated mobile team. If a company could have a native team that can “write once and deploy everywhere” like RN can, they would do it immediately. It’s not that the company wants to compromise on quality, they’re just trying to optimize for profits. But if that company could have some thing, not some one, write all the code for them and deploy it everywhere, they wouldn’t need a team at all! You can see where I’m going with this, which brings me to your next question.
…will I still get a job as a React Native app developer in future, if I learn it good?
I don’t think it’s unreasonable to assume that within the next 5-10 years, most of what we have to do manually today (like writing code), will be done by some deployable instance of a generative AI bot. Tools like CodeWhisperer or Copilot can already write code that’s much better than anything you’ll ever write. Other tools like Devon take that to a whole new level by writing full-blown software with all its bells and whistles. It’s just a matter of time before there’s a tool that writes apps. And a machine doesn’t care if the apps are written in Swift, Kotlin or Javascript - it can do it all.
In that case, when you (the company) have a choice of having a bridged RN app, or having a real native app with all its special sauce, and both solutions cost the same, it would difficult to justify using RN for anything at all.
So if you’re asking whether or not you’ll be able to get a job as an RN app developer, it really depends on when you intend to look for your job and how long you intend to keep it. The long-term prospects of it seem pretty bleak by the way of my reasoning. But if you’re optimizing just for the next decade, go for it.
On the other hand, you will still need native developers to ask your AI bot the right questions, give it the right instructions, and check its work. But you won’t need a whole team of them, just a few. In 10 years, you’ll want to be that one human on an AI mobile team that knows how to talk to bots so they can do what they do best. And if you want to be able to advise and correct AI bots, you better get to know the tools they all use to build their stuff. The easiest way to achieve that gaol is by building lots of stuff yourself. A good job will be a mere byproduct of your efforts.
If I could give you one unsolicited piece of advice, I’d recommend you get well-rounded by doing many different things. Just like an LLM, a seasoned software engineer can jump from technology to technology without much of a problem because we can read the patterns now. And just like an LLM, we got to this point by consuming and processing a ton of data. And by failing, failing a lot.
