How to hire a React Native developer
If you are not technical, a confident developer and a good one sound exactly the same in a first call. These are the five questions that tell them apart, what a real answer sounds like, and the things worth walking away from.
The short version: almost every question people ask in these calls is about writing the app, which is the part least likely to go wrong. Ask about shipping it instead.
These five work even if you hire someone else. That is deliberate. A list of criteria that only one person can meet is not advice, it is an advert.
1. Have you shipped a React Native app to both stores?
Writing an app and getting one live are different skills, and only one of them is on most portfolios. Apple and Google each have their own review process, their own rules about what a paywall may do, their own privacy declarations and their own reasons to reject you.
A good answer names apps, dates and whose developer account they went out under. A weak answer talks about years of experience with React Native without naming anything currently live. Experience building is not experience shipping.
2. Can I download something you built?
This is the cheapest question on the list and the one most people skip. Ask for a store link you can install on your own phone, today.
Screenshots, design mockups and case studies are not a shipped app. Work under NDA is a real thing and some of the best work is invisible for that reason, but somebody who ships regularly will have at least one public listing they can point at. If nothing at all can be shown, that is worth understanding before you go further, not after.
Then actually install it. Use it for five minutes. You are not auditing the code, you are checking whether the thing feels finished.
3. Who handles the store side?
Store listings, screenshots at several device sizes, descriptions and keywords, a privacy policy, data safety declarations on Google Play, privacy nutrition labels on the App Store, age ratings, and the review rejections that arrive regardless.
None of this is hard. All of it takes time, and it lands exactly when you thought you were finished. It only becomes a problem when nobody agreed in advance whose job it was. Get the answer named and priced before the build starts, whichever way it goes.
4. What happens when React Native is not enough?
Most apps eventually need something React Native does not do on its own: a specific piece of hardware, a background behaviour, an SDK that only ships native code. Somebody then has to write native code, or find and vet a library that already did.
Ask for a specific occasion when this happened and what they did about it. This is the question that separates people who have shipped several apps from people who have finished several tutorials. A developer who has genuinely never hit this has not shipped much.
5. Who maintains it after launch?
Operating systems update every year, stores change their rules, dependencies get deprecated and certificates expire. An app with nobody maintaining it starts breaking within about a year, whether or not you have added a single feature.
On my own apps this is not a footnote. Wallety's heaviest month of development was June, five months after it was already live, at 350 commits. Launch is not the finish line, and the person you hire should be planning for that out loud.
Red flags
- A price before any questions. If someone can quote your app before understanding it, they are quoting a template, and the number will move once the work is real.
- Team size as the pitch. Fifty developers is a reassuring sentence and tells you nothing about who will actually be assigned to you, or whether they have shipped anything.
- A portfolio nobody can name. Logos and industries instead of apps you can open. Ask which ones are live and search for them yourself.
- No mention of maintenance. A proposal that ends at launch is describing half a project, and the missing half arrives whether it was budgeted or not.
Freelancer, agency, or one developer
All three can work and all three fail differently. An agency gives you process and continuity, and you usually do not talk to whoever writes the code. A marketplace freelancer is cheapest to start and the hardest to verify, because the review score measures delivery, not whether the app survived a year. A single experienced developer gives you direct contact and one person who knows the whole thing, and their capacity is genuinely limited.
What matters more than the category is the answer to question two. Somebody who has shipped and maintained their own work has met the problems your project is going to hit, whichever box they sit in.
What to send when you get in touch
A paragraph about what you want to build. Not a specification, not a feature list, and not an NDA before a conversation has happened. What the app does, who it is for, and anything that has to be true for it to be worth building.
Anyone worth hiring will come back with questions rather than a number. If cost is the next thing on your mind, I have written separately about what a React Native app costs to build, and about whether React Native or Flutter fits your app.
If you would rather just talk to someone
I build React Native apps for founders and small businesses, and I ship my own. Wallety and Qurany are both live on the App Store and Google Play, which means you can apply question two to me before you write a word.
hello@orbitapps.net, or read more about working with me on React Native.