An honest comparison of cost, performance and long-term maintenance for each approach.
The honest answer is that both are now good enough for most apps, so the decision should be made on team and roadmap rather than on benchmarks.
Where cross-platform wins
One codebase, one team, and features shipping to both platforms at once. For content-driven apps, internal tools, marketplaces and most business software, the performance difference is not something a user can perceive. The savings are real and recurring, because every future feature is written once rather than twice.
Where native still earns its cost
Heavy graphics and games, sustained camera or video processing, tight integration with new OS features on the day they launch, background work with strict battery constraints, and anything where a few milliseconds of input latency is the product. In these cases the bridge overhead is not theoretical.
The maintenance question people skip
Cross-platform frameworks move quickly, and an annual upgrade cycle is real work. Native gets you closer to the platform but doubles the surface area for every change. Ask which cost your team can actually absorb in year three, not just which is cheaper to start.
If you do not have a specific, testable reason to go native, cross-platform is the sensible default in 2026, and you can always rewrite one performance-critical screen natively later.
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