It’s not enough to know that companies like Microsoft and Shopify use React Native.
The real question is: how do they use it to win?
In 2025, mobile is a primary revenue driver for many US businesses. For top companies, their mobile app can account for over 50% of all sales.
These leaders don’t just use React Native to save money. They use it as a strategic tool to build better, faster, and more engaging cross-platform apps.
This guide goes beyond the surface. We’ll break down how 12 industry-leading companies use React Native to solve real business problems and gain a powerful competitive edge.
Table of Contents
1. The Social & Community Playbook: Engineering for Velocity and Scale
For apps that depend on user engagement, it’s important to add new features quickly while keeping a high-quality user experience. The following case study shows how a major company uses React Native to do this on a large scale.
Instagram: How Instagram Uses React Native
At Instagram, React Native is used to speed up the development of new features inside their existing native iOS and Android apps.
How They Use It
Instagram did not rewrite its entire application in React Native. Instead, they use a “brownfield” approach, which means they add React Native for specific features, one at a time. They started with simple screens like Push Notifications and the Edit Profile page.
This allowed their team to build out their core React Native infrastructure (like navigation and translation tools) while still shipping new product updates to users. To keep the app’s file size small, they only added the specific parts of React Native that were needed for each new feature.
The Key Takeaway for 2025
The Instagram example shows that you don’t have to rebuild your entire app to use React Native. For large, established companies, one of its biggest strengths is that it can be added in small, manageable pieces.
This approach lowers the risk of modernizing an application. Teams can get the speed and efficiency benefits of React Native for new features without the huge cost and risk of a complete rewrite.
Discord: The Blueprint for Cross-Platform Parity
Discord uses React Native as the foundation of its mobile app strategy. This allows the company to provide a nearly identical, real-time chat experience on both iOS and Android devices.
How They Use It
A key part of their success is a single, unified codebase. Discord shares 98% of its code between its iOS and Android apps.
This high level of code sharing means that their web developers, who already know React, can easily build and own entire features for the mobile apps. To solve performance issues with long, dynamic lists (like a server’s member list), they used high-performance community libraries. As of 2025, Discord is moving to React Native’s New Architecture to get even better performance.
The Key Takeaway for 2025
The Discord example shows how a small, unified team can use React Native to build and maintain a complex, high-performance app for millions of users across multiple platforms.
This is a huge advantage for any business. It proves that a cross-platform strategy can deliver both high quality and fast development, even for an application with a very large user base.
Pinterest: Delivering a Media-Rich User Experience
Pinterest uses React Native to power its app, which proves the framework can efficiently handle an interface with many images and a dynamic layout.
How They Use It
The main part of the Pinterest experience is its grid of images and videos. React Native’s component-based architecture is a perfect fit for this.
Developers can create a single, reusable “Pin” component. This component is then used to display all the content in the app’s long, scrolling lists. The company’s goal is to deliver a smooth, native-feeling user experience, which is very important for an app that is focused on visual content.
The Key Takeaway for 2025
The Pinterest example shows that React Native is not just for simple, data-focused apps.
It is a strong framework for building applications with a lot of media, like images and videos. Its good performance with large datasets and image grids makes it a solid choice for any brand where the visual experience is a key part of the product.
E-commerce Case Studies: Building the Customer Journey
In the world of online retail, a fast and easy-to-use mobile app is essential. These companies use React Native to build and improve their shopping experiences for millions of customers.
Walmart: A Hybrid Approach to Improve Performance
The Goal: Walmart used React Native to fix the poor user experience of its old mobile app and improve its performance.
How They Use It: Walmart rebuilt its app and now shares 95% of the code between its iOS and Android versions. They used a hybrid approach: they kept the app’s main navigation in native code but built individual screens in React Native. This gave them better performance in page transitions and a more native feel. They also open-sourced their tool, Electrode Native, to help other companies with similar projects.
The Key Takeaway for 2025: The Walmart example shows that a hybrid approach can be a very effective way to modernize a large app. Using native code for core navigation and React Native for UI screens can improve both performance and developer speed.
Shopify: A Unified Platform Strategy
The Goal: Shopify uses React Native as the foundation for all of its mobile apps. This includes the main Shopify app for merchants, the consumer-facing Shop app, and the Shopify Point of Sale (POS) system used in physical stores.
How They Use It: After deciding to go all-in on the framework, Shopify fully migrated its main mobile app to React Native. This resulted in a single codebase for 86% of the app and allowed them to remove 1.8 million lines of separate native code. As of 2025, they are actively using React Native’s New Architecture, which has already improved their Android app’s launch time by 10%.
The Key Takeaway for 2025: The Shopify example shows the power of using React Native as the standard for an entire family of products. This allows a single team to share code and expertise across multiple apps, which greatly speeds up the launch of new products and features.
Uber Eats: Strategic Integration for a Key Feature
The Goal: Inside the larger, complex Uber Eats application, the company uses React Native for one specific, important feature: the Restaurant Dashboard.
How They Use It: The Restaurant Dashboard is the tool restaurant owners use to manage orders and their business on the platform. It needs a good user interface, real-time updates, and reliable push notifications. The Uber Eats team chose React Native for this part of the app because it allowed them to build and update the UI quickly.
The Key Takeaway for 2025: The Uber Eats example shows that you don’t have to commit your entire application to React Native. It can be used strategically to build and manage a single, important feature inside a larger native app. This allows you to use the right tool for the right job.
Enterprise & Fintech Case Studies: Building for Trust and Scale
For business and financial apps, security and performance are essential. These companies show how React Native can be used to build reliable, enterprise-grade applications trusted by millions.
Microsoft: Enterprise-Level Adoption
The Goal: Microsoft uses React Native in some of its biggest and most important products, including Office, Outlook, and Teams. This shows the framework is trusted for use in major business applications that are used by hundreds of millions of people every day.
How They Use It: Microsoft is a major contributor to the React Native project. They lead the development of React Native for Windows and macOS, which allows developers to build desktop apps for those platforms from the same codebase as their mobile apps.
The Key Takeaway for 2025: The use and active support of React Native by a company like Microsoft gives other large businesses confidence in its long-term stability, security, and scalability.
Bloomberg: Delivering Real-Time Financial Data
The Goal: Bloomberg uses React Native for its consumer mobile app to deliver fast-breaking financial news and market data to a global audience.
How They Use It: They use React Native’s Over-the-Air (OTA) update feature to push new code and data to users’ phones instantly, without requiring a full app store update. They also found that because React Native runs its logic on a separate thread from the main UI, they could add features like video feeds and interactive animations without slowing down the app’s performance.
The Key Takeaway for 2025: The Bloomberg example shows that React Native is a good choice for data-heavy apps that need real-time updates. Using the framework helped Bloomberg cut its development time in half.
Coinbase & Chime: Building Trust in Fintech
The Goal: Top fintech companies like Coinbase and Chime use React Native for their main mobile apps. This proves the framework can meet the high security and reliability needs of the financial industry.
How They Use It: Coinbase uses React Native’s component structure to create a library of reusable UI parts (like forms and buttons), which makes development faster and keeps the app’s design consistent. They also use modern data-fetching tools with React’s “Suspense” feature. This allows the app to show parts of the screen to the user right away, while the rest of the data loads in the background, making the app feel much faster.
The Key Takeaway for 2025: The Coinbase and Chime examples show that a well-built React Native app can deliver the security and smooth user experience needed to earn customer trust in the financial technology space.
The Innovation Playbook: Engineering Beyond the Boundaries
The most innovative apps show that React Native is a flexible tool that can be combined with other specialized technologies to create unique user experiences.
Tesla: A Hybrid Approach for a Unique Experience
The Goal: The Tesla app uses React Native for its main user interface but combines it with a specialized 3D game engine for a key feature that defines their brand.
How They Use It: Most of the app’s controls—locking the doors, setting the climate, and checking the car’s status—are built in React Native. This provides development speed and a consistent user experience on both iOS and Android.
However, for the interactive 3D model of the car that users can rotate and zoom, Tesla integrates the Godot game engine. They built custom “native bridges” to allow the React Native part of the app to communicate with the 3D rendering part of the app.
The Key Takeaway for 2025: The Tesla example shows that the best mobile strategy is often a hybrid one. A company can use React Native to build the majority of its app efficiently. Then, for a special feature that makes the product unique, it can integrate another best-in-class tool.
This changes the discussion from “React Native vs. Native” to “React Native and Native,” which often results in a better final product.