Its was a good read until at the end ...

> For the remainder of 2026, Microsoft is cooking up a big one: replacing more and more native apps with React Native. But don't let the name fool you, there's nothing "native" about it. These are projects designed to be easily ported across any machine and architecture, because underneath it all, it's just JavaScript. And each one spawns its own Chromium process, gobbling up your RAM so you can enjoy the privilege of opening the Settings app.

I'm a little tired of people junking on react native when they have no clue what they talked about (And I'm not even react native dev but iOS dev). React Native doesn't spawn any chromium process. This is not electron. React Native doesn't even use v8 engine. All UI views and widgets are native. Platform SDK is native, Yoga Layout is native C++ and even faster than UIKit layout. Majority of RN code is Native - go have a look at github at languages section. JS is only 19% of codebase, everything else is C++, Obj-C, Obj-C++, Kotlin, Java.

The problem AFAIK with startup being laggy was making http requests to downloads those ads.

But why is Microsoft using JS and react native when they already have a native UI toolkit for C# and C++? [1] It's strange they don't dogfood their own tech.

[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/winui/winui3/

> React Native doesn't even use v8 engine

Are you saying you would use React Native with a language other than JS?