I've used expo, which is really just react native with some helpful tooling around it. It was my first real project with react as well, and all and all I'd recommend it.

React native is pretty great, but there's a steep learning curve. Expo has some bugs, and once you get off the beaten path you might have some issues. You always have the option of ejecting to react native or native code, but the expo app is incredible - you can do live updates remotely, the app will just reload with the changes without rebuilding everything

I'll probably use it for most apps moving forward