While I mostly agree with you, this is the kind of thing that might not have been done if the AI couldn't do the heavy lifting.

They had previously chosen React Native because it was easier for programmers to keep it updated, since it was really just 1 codebase. With AI, those same programmers can do the more difficult version, keeping the native apps updated separately.

So did it kill a job, or did it make it possible for the existing programmers to do it better?

It's the kind of thing that is really hard to determine in general, but here, it really does sound like they only made the change because it became possible with existing resources. They would not have done it otherwise.

This is a type of project that likely wouldn't have been done before AI

This app has 15/20 screens, an app this small wouldn't employ many people to begin with. Before there was one guy (op) maintaining it in react native and now he maintains it native. I don't see much change tbh.

The optimistic outlook:

Just like this has made Web devs into Mobile devs, so could Mobile devs leverage AI to work in Web shops.

I'm not an optimist but there could be an increase of available apps being created which would still keep people employed. Theoretically the cost of creating an iOS app for a company without an engineering team dropped from several hundreds of thousand to a few thousand or hundreds, which could be paid out to a freelancer with AI. More people would go into freelancing for industries which were not contemplated before due to cost.

But I'm not an optimist.

This is an incredibly boring task. Nothing new, just rewrite everything to just see it all rewritten again in 1 year. Perfect for LLMs and something humans shouldn't do.

It ported overnight. I don't think it would create from scratch without a lot of hand holding.