React Native Mobile App Development

React Native is a development framework that allows dev teams to create native iOS/Android mobile apps using JavaScript. By using React Native, you don’t have to code in specialized native mobile languages such as Java/Kotlin (for Android) and Obj-C/Swift (for iOS). Instead, you can put together the same fundamental UI building blocks as regular iOS and Android apps using JavaScript and React.

React Native is being developed by Facebook. Initially an internal project, React Native became open source in March 2015. It is also supported by other companies including: Wix (a cloud-based web development platform), Airbnb, Microsoft and many others, who contribute to open source libraries for React Native.

Just like React Virtual DOM, React Native creates an internal representation of the rendered UI. This tree-shaped structure helps calculate differences between each layout change, optimizing the rendering process.

Developers use React’s declarative API in their JavaScript source code, which is later translated to fully native components, which are different for iOS and Android. This means that a React Native developer does not need to know to what exact type of components his code is being translated into.

Working on such a higher level of abstraction can lead to increased productivity and unified development for both platforms.

Unlike “pure native” mobile development for Android and iOS, React Native apps are developed using JavaScript. This makes it much more friendly to web frontend developers.

However, a React Native developer should also be familiar with basic Obj-C, Swift and Java syntax as well as iOS/Android tools such as Xcode, Android Studio, Gradle and CocoaPods.

This makes a React Native developer’s skillset very unique: they need to know everything that a Web React Frontend developer knows plus all of the additional aspects within native app development. The final outcome of React Native is a fully native app, same as an app completely written in Java or Swift.

React Native offers many nice tweaks to the mobile development workflow, including live reload and hot reload, which allows developers to make changes to the source code of the app without needing to recompile it. It is blazing fast and significantly speeds up the software development process.

React Native also offers other useful tools like the React DOM inspector and performance monitors.Additionally, keep in mind that apps written using React Native will share the codebase for Android and iOS, making them much easier to maintain and develop.On top of that, the React architecture itself also helps increase developer velocity compared to other technologies.

Although both React Native and hybrid mobile development frameworks like Ionic use similar technologies, the end product can be very different.We should keep in mind that apps developed with React Native are fully native mobile apps, just like their Swift or Java counterparts. It is not an app wrapped in a web view.

Therefore, the user will easily distinguish between those two types of apps just by interacting with them. A hybrid app will not be as intuitive and it will have less access to the phone’s features.You can achieve the best user experience only using native mobile apps, and React Native apps are one of those.

Yes it is! Having a common codebase for both iOS and Android is the main reason why React Native is a better option for multiplatform apps than having separate Java and Swift apps.

Also, the React component-based architecture helps easily add new features to the app by adding more “building blocks”. Sometimes mobile development expertise may be required to design a solution that will work equally well for both platforms, which might be a problem for less experienced developers.

Much more than with hybrid-web mobile apps and almost everything that you can do with fully native apps. At IISN, we successfully implemented features like push notifications, camera and camera roll access, deep linking, background geolocation, native maps support, Bluetooth LE connectivity, Lottie animations, SVG, extra storage encryption, and integration of various crash reporting and analytics tools.

But these are only examples from our work. Much more can be achieved using React Native, including fingerprint authentication, support for native payment platforms or barcode scanners just by using modules supported by the community.If there is no module for something that your product might need, it is always possible to create React Native bindings for it.

React Native is not designed for games. It lacks a physics engine and there are technologies that would fit this use case much better. Also, because of its architecture, it would be really hard or even impossible to create a fully working system widget in pure React Native. However, what you cannot create using just React Native you can instead build using either Java or Swift and then connect it to React Native as a module. There are also some less popular modules, that do not have their counterparts in React Native, but it is always possible to create bindings for them.

Yes it is! Actually, React Native has one of the most robust open source communities, which support hundreds of projects related to React Native. Having such support is a great asset when working on software development due to the variety of open source modules that we can use in our apps. It speeds up the development process and optimizes costs because we can take production-ready components, libraries and modules developed by other people and companies instead of creating them from scratch. This allows us to focus on providing business value instead of creating tools to provide it.