I'm pretty skeptical of React Native, for the same reasons you're nervous about the web. The great thing about Native development is you can drop down pretty low and optimize. During native development you do it alot. The native widgets don't suck, but performance can be awful as soon as you want to draw anything remotely special. So you drop down and start writing custom layout and drawing routines. I don't see React being good at that (maybe I'm wrong though, I haven't dug into it).
Those problems aren't that far from the web. There's no reason you can't draw entire pages made of canvas[top="0"][left="0"] and then measure position/transform everything by hand. You'd probably get great performance that way. Its basically what Flipboard did from what I read. Its what native app developers do as well. Phones suck. They have no power. You basically have to do this stuff to make them work. I have no idea why the web-dev community freaks out when someone does it. "You wrote a custom layout engine! Are you nuts!" is not something you'll hear from Android or iOS devs.
Those problems aren't that far from the web. There's no reason you can't draw entire pages made of canvas[top="0"][left="0"] and then measure position/transform everything by hand. You'd probably get great performance that way. Its basically what Flipboard did from what I read. Its what native app developers do as well. Phones suck. They have no power. You basically have to do this stuff to make them work. I have no idea why the web-dev community freaks out when someone does it. "You wrote a custom layout engine! Are you nuts!" is not something you'll hear from Android or iOS devs.