tl;dr The Hybrid app took longer to ship (+ 20%), and was more expensive (+ 525%)
We were able to participate in a unique experiment: - Develop a native app for iOS and Android at the same time a separate team was developing the exact same app as Hybrid (Cordova/React).
The app had 20 screens and used modern UX (onboarding, profiles, hamburger menus, alerts, GPS, content rich screens (text/images/video) with lists/details talking to a backend REST API with local/offline/sync'd storage.
Native = 8 man/weeks
- 1 iOS dev for 4 weeks - 1 Android dev for 4 weeks
Hybrid = 50 man/weeks
- 5 Hybrid devs 10 weeks
You can argue that the 5 devs had overhead in communication and project management, but we observed that was not a major contributing factor.
The above was for app development (not the server). Hybrid app required the same amount of QA as the Native app.