7 Things you should know about React Native

The popularity of React Native has skyrocketed for the past 2 years. Meet the framework developed by Facebook Team that stands behind Facebook, Instagram, and Skype mobile apps.

What is React Native?

React Native is a JavaScript framework for writing real, natively rendering mobile applications for Android, iOS, and Universal Windows Platform. As its name suggests, it is based on React (Facebook’s and Instagram’s JavaScript library for building user interfaces), but it doesn’t target the browser. Instead, Mobile platforms are the main targets of React Native.

React Native applications are written using JavaScript and JSX (HTML/XML-like structures), but then it invokes the native rendering APIs in Objective-C or Java depending on the platform, meaning that your app will consist of real mobile UI components, not review. Your app will feel and look like any other native mobile application.

React Native can access platform features like a phone camera, user’s location due to the exposed JavaScript interfaces for platform APIs. According to John A. Calderaio from Medium.com, React Native manages GPU and Memory more efficiently than Swift. After a series of benchmarks and tests, he states that “I am now more convinced than ever that React-Native is the framework of the future.”

Upwork.com, as we know, has described React Native as the future of hybrid app development, and since React Native launched in 2015 the interest in this framework keeps constantly growing. React Native was used to developing apps like Facebook, Instagram, Skype, Airbnb, Walmart, Tesla, etc. But why?

What are the advantages of React Native?

JavaScript – React Native uses mainly the JavaScript, one of the fastest and widely-used programming languages out there meaning that typically you can find React Native developer relatively quickly.

Updates – It is possible for developers to push updates directly to the users so that users don’t have to worry about downloading updates from for example Google Play. Unfortunately, Apple’s new guidelines ban any form of Code Push in AppStore apps.

UI and Performance Currently used methods of writing mobile applications are combinations of JavaScript, HTML, and CSS typically rendered using webviews. This approach works, but it comes with drawbacks around performance.

Some frameworks also try to mimic or copy the native UI elements, but the result feels a little bit off. Creating details like animations may take a lot of time, effort and will probably become out of date really quickly.

React Native has got you covered! It translates your markup to real, native UI elements, leveraging existing means of rendering on whatever platform you are working with.

On top of that, React works different from the UI meaning that your applications still maintain high performance without compromising capability. This means that developers coming from the Web with React can write mobile apps with the performance, look and feel of a native application, while using familiar tools.

Code Sharing and Cross-Platform Working with React Native can shrink the resources needed to build mobile applications. Any developer familiar with React can easily pick up React Native and now target both Web and mobile platforms with the same skillset.

Much of your code can be shared across other supported platforms. Keep in mind that depending on the functionality of your app, not all the code you write will be cross-platform. However, if you want to build an app for both iOS and Android choosing React Native will definitely save you a lot of time, money and lines of code.

Learn More: https://www.iihglobal.com/blog/about-react-native/