Adalo got you to the App Store fast, and that was the whole point. The trade-off is becoming visible: bundle size, battery drain on background actions, the plugin ceiling, and the per-user pricing that scales with success. The good news is that almost every Adalo concept has a clean React Native equivalent — usually with the upside of being more capable.
What carries over 1:1
- Component layout — Adalo's screens map to React Native screens with React Navigation.
- Database collections — to Firebase, Supabase, or your own Node API + Postgres.
- Sign-in / sign-up — to Auth0, Clerk, or Firebase Auth, with social providers built in.
- Push notifications — Adalo's are wrappers; native FCM/APNs replace them and are more reliable.
- In-app purchases — RevenueCat handles iOS + Android in one SDK, with analytics Adalo never showed you.
What changes (mostly for the better)
Adalo's 'Custom Actions' marketplace is a comfort zone you'll lose — and gain a much bigger one. Anything on npm or pub.dev is now installable, including SDKs Adalo never supported (HealthKit, ARKit, MLKit, native CameraX). React Native's plugin freedom is the main reason teams who switch never go back.
What disappears
Adalo's drag-and-drop editor is gone, of course. So is the per-user fee. So is the build queue you don't control. So is the ceiling you've been bumping into when designers ask for animations beyond fade and slide.
Migration in five passes
- 1Export Adalo data via their CSV export and pipe into your new database. Validate row counts and a 1% diff sample.
- 2Recreate screens in React Native with the same component breakdown — Adalo's component model is closer to RN than to Flutter, which makes this fast.
- 3Map Adalo Actions to typed handlers. A 'Send Email' action becomes a function that calls Postmark or SendGrid. A 'Custom Action' usually becomes a 30-line wrapper around an SDK.
- 4Re-implement push, in-app purchases, and deep links as first-class native features.
- 5Beta release via TestFlight + Internal Testing track. Cut over once your retention curves match the old app for 7 days.
Pro tip: Don't cut over your App Store listing. Submit the React Native build to the same bundle ID and let users get it as an update. Reviews, ratings, and download history all survive.
Performance, the part nobody talks about
Cold start times typically drop from 4–6 seconds to under 1.2 seconds. Frame rates stop dipping below 60fps during scroll. Battery drain becomes invisible. None of this requires heroic optimization — it's the difference between a webview-style runtime and a real native one.
Want a copy of our Adalo-to-React-Native checklist? Book a scoping call and we'll send the full version, customised to your app.