A few reasons I chose to build Bathtimer in React Native:

1. It's cross platform. At the moment, there's only an Android app, but it's very comforting that I can instantly product an iOS version when I'm ready. I would hate to rebuild everything from scratch and re-track all of the features, including those I forgot existed.

2. I enjoy Javascript. I know it's not everyone's favorite, so I'm lucky to have this tool.

There aren't only upsides to React Native. Two of its biggest criticisms is the slower performance and larger bundle size for apps built with it.

1. Performance. Bathtimer is a fairly small and simply app. There isn't anything computationally intense happening in the app, so I can take the performance hit without it becoming a huge concern.

2. Bundle size. This one kind of sucks. Bathtimer is ~33MB in the Play Store, and I know it could be <10MB (15MB, worst case estimate) if I built the app natively. I have to go back at some point and try to cut out as many unneeded packages, etc. This is admittedly a negative with using React Native.