Funny enough this was my first mobile app ever, I figured it out doing it. Expo helped a lot. The Apple review process on the other hand… that was a whole learning experience on its own.

RN does use a lot of native code. It’s not based on a webview like Electron is. Most of the builtin components are native views and there’s no CSS. The JS engine is also simpler. It’s more akin to the lua runtime in Neovim.