I recently started working for a startup, and they wanted an app.
What I shipped was a react native app (so I don't need to go in to Xcode to build), that renders a full screen web browser that points to our website. I've sprinkled in bits of injected JS to capture our cookies and local/session storage - which then gets saved to device storage and reinjected on app startup.
There are a few native-ish bits sprinkled in - onboarding, notifications, error screens, loading indicators, etc - but for the most part we don't need to worry about our API borking old versions (which is moving extraordinarily fast).
The only semi tricky bit was native auth integration - that needs treated with a bit more care, and stored securely, but it took a few days.
I ship the app to TestFlight and the AppStore using Fastlane from the command line, match handles the certs, and I never have to open Xcode.
It is honestly bliss, and i've heard a lot of app developers moving to this model (interestingly it normally follows a failed SDUX implementation)
* This is coming from someone doing iOS since the store opened in 2008. I've pretty much seen ALL the bad decisions at some point. There are projects I will not take no matter what the pay is.
Worse is going to be the job listing, no native iOS developer is going to touch it. It’s possible a rn + ts developer might find it an interesting challenge and maybe even have some iOS experience. I guess it all comes down to what the job qualifications are in said listing. But is your startup going to know this when/if they need to do a backfill?
But here’s the caveat to what I said. If the rest of the team you’re working in is also using the same language and maybe has some familiarity in react native it’s probably not so bad and someone can step into your shoes if necessary. Also, if your implementation is fully transparent and this is what the startup paid for, then I’m going to say more power to you, you built them what they needed and you did it your way.