React Native – Mobile app development

React Native is a JavaScript framework for developing mobile applications on iOS and Android. It’s based on React, Facebook’s JavaScript library for building user interfaces, but instead of targeting the browser, it targets mobile platforms. React Native makes it easy to simultaneously develop for both Android and iOS with one code base which is why I have enjoyed working with React Native — It’s cross-platform capabilities.

Similar to React for the Web, React Native applications are written using a mixture of JavaScript and XML-esque markup, known as JSX. Then, under the hood, the React Native “bridge” invokes the native rendering APIs in Objective-C (for iOS) or Java (for Android). Thus, your application will render using real mobile UI components, not webviews, and will look and feel like any other mobile application. React Native also exposes JavaScript interfaces for platform APIs, so your React Native apps can access platform features like the phone camera, or the user’s location.

Advantages of React Native

If you’ve ever developed for mobile before, you might be surprised by how easy React Native is to work with. The React Native team has baked strong developer tools and meaningful error messages into the framework, so working with robust tools is a natural part of your development experience.

Once you learn the React lifecycle components and the basics of ES6 (React Native uses ES6 standards for Javascript), you are all set to get started with your first React Native application. Facebook’s official documentation is very helpful and provides a good insight into React Native components and APIs.

You don’t need to know Objective-C, Swift or Java. With Javascript and JSX you build your app which works very well cross-platforms. From my experience, almost 95% of the code is shared between iOS and Android, with minor tweaks to polish the end product on both platforms. Isn’t that just great? You don’t have to have multiple teams and codebases to support the same app cross-platforms. Instead, you have one team and one codebase that works on both the iOS and Android versions of the app. This is a huge win for small companies and a cost and time saver.

This is why React Native is very popular over the last couple years they’re plenty of developers contributing to make React Native Community better everyday.