概要
公開日: 2026-05-20
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原文
This is a guest post from Perttu Lähteenlahti - he is a developer advocate at RevenueCat where he focuses on helping developers make money from their apps. The mobile app business has gotten brutal in a way that doesn't get talked about enough. According to RevenueCat's State of Subscription Apps 2026 report, which covers over 115,000 apps and around $16B in revenue, the top 25% of apps grew 80% year over year. At the same time the bottom 25% shrank by 33%. Essentially the market is turning into winners and losers. The thing is, that gap isn't really about better ideas. Most of the apps in the top quartile aren't doing something nobody else thought of. They're doing the same thing as everyone else, but shipping faster, testing more, and treating monetization as an iterative process instead of an afterthought. This article will look at how to build a mobile app that makes money, by selecting the right stack, taking the best monetization tricks from best apps, and looking at what Expo apps need to win. This blog is the appetizer for a talk I’m giving at next week's App.js conference, where I’m presenting about whether AI is making React Native obsolete. These takes are directly related to the research I did to answer that question, and another question: do you make money with React Native apps, or should you just let agents to port your app written in Swift or Kotlin to another platform. The 2026 stack, opinionated I have a very opinionated stack, that will make sense as we dive deeper into the article. Fundamentally the stack is about few core concepts: - Build fast, deliver faster - Make use of native OS level APIs as much as possible - Delightful and quick to use offline Following these core concepts, my stack has changed over the years as I’ve replaced old tools with new tools that work better or have better DX: - Expo and EAS for building, submitting, and updating your app. Everything starts with this. A few years ago I would have gone with a bare React Native app, now I can’t even think about releasing without Expo. - Tanstack query for managing data fetching, mutations, and server state in general. Paired with react-native-network-info and react-native-mmkv for building apps that handle offline states gracefully. - expo-apple-targets for jumping into native code. Native integrations are important. Don’t build apps that don’t make use of stuff like widgets, App Intents, Spotlight search, and Live activities. Users expect these features. - RevenueCat for subscriptions, paywalls, and entitlements. Of course I’m biased - I work for RevenueCat. But even if you don’t want to take my advice on this, take this learning with you: don’t build subscription infra yourself. Your app and its monetization are your business, not the payment infrastructure. Each choice in that list gives you time back, and the time you get back is the difference between shipping in a weekend and shipping in a quarter. A solo developer with a well whipped agent and this stack can be charging real money in a real app inside of a few days. The reason the stack matters for monetization is because React Native apps are, statistically, better at making money. The State of Subscription Apps report breaks down revenue by framework, and React Native apps come out ahead of both native and Flutter apps on basically every metric that matters: money per install, paying user retention, lifetime value. The data is similar from the last two years so it can’t be said to be just an AI driven development anomaly. Why React Native monetizes well is something I’ve written before: my TL;DR is that React Native attracts the kind of developer who's optimizing for shipping speed and cross-platform reach from the start, which tends to correlate with the kind of person who treats monetization as a product problem rather than an afterthought. React Native also enables iteration, and iteration leads to better quality, which leads to better end user experience which makes you more mon