Key advantages of developing Mobile Apps using React Native

Through the years of mobile app development, we’ve learned to develop apps using short term development cycles using hybrid platforms. With two operating systems dominating the landscape, businesses creating mobile apps often face a compromise: apps that provide a better user experience, or apps that are faster to develop and run on more platforms and devices.

At the crux of user experience and ease of development is the hybrid mobile app using JavaScript, or HTML5 and CSS which is basically a web app that can run natively on a device. Through these years web app started dominating the App Store & Play Store allowing developers to take limited time and build apps for iOS & Android. Recently frameworks like Xamarin & React Native created huge impact by allowing fast and smooth interface for apps making it stand ahead of normal web apps. We have already provided the advantages of using Xamarin. Now take a look at the advantages of developing apps using React Native.

1. Initially, Facebook developed React Native to support iOS. However with its recent support of the Android operating system, the library can now render mobile UIs for both platforms. Facebook used React Native to build its own Ads Manager app, creating both an iOS and an Android version. Both versions were built by the same team of developers. Facebook also made React Native open-source, with the idea that compatibility with other platforms like Windows or tvOS. Let’s look at a small example component which can be used to display a simple button.

const Button = React.createClass({

propTypes: {

                 onPress: React.PropTypes.func.isRequired,

                 text: React.PropTypes.string.isRequired,

},

render() {

                return (

                              <TouchableOpacity onPress={this.props.onPress} style={…}>

                                             <Text style={…}>{this.props.text}</Text>

                              </TouchableOpacity>

            );

}

});

This Button component has two pieces of input data: onPress, which is a callback function for when the button is pressed; and text, which is the string to display inside the button. The XML-like structure you see returned by the render function is called JSX, which is syntactic sugar for React function calls andnd TouchableOpacity and Text are existing components that are included with React Native. This Button component can be used many times throughout the application, with consistent behavior and styling.

2. With the launch of React Native, we can say Bye Bye to Gone WebView components of other hybrid mobile apps. This is because React Native’s building blocks are reusable “native components” that compile directly to native. Components you’d use in iOS or Android have counterparts right in React, so you’ll get a consistent look and feel.

3. You can incorporate React Native components into your already developed app. Or, if your existing hybrid app was built with Cordova and Ionic, reuse that Cordova-based code easily with a plugin.

4. If you know JavaScript, React Native is an easy to learn platform, allowing any front-end web developer to be a mobile developer. You need not want to learn iOS’s Swift or Java for Android—just know JavaScript, some native UI elements, platform APIs, and any other platform-specific design patterns and you’re good to go. Ract Native’s library includes Fllexbox CSS styling, inline styling, debugging, and support deploying to either the App Store or Google Play.

5. React Native is focused solely on building a mobile UI. Compared with JavaScript frameworks like AngularJS or MeteorJS, React Native is UI-focused, making it more like a JavaScript library than a framework. The resulting UI is highly responsive and feels fluid. This means the app will have quicker load times than a typical hybrid app, and a smoother feel.

6. React Native is all about bringing the speed and agility of web app development to the hybrid space with native results. Under React Native’s hood is Facebook’s popular ReactJS UI library for web applications. React Native brings all of ReactJS’s better app performance, DOM abstraction, and simplified programming methods to hybrid mobile development.

7. React Native lets you link the plugin with a native module, so you can link a Google map up with the device’s functions like zoom, rotate, and the compass, while using less memory and loading faster.

Getting started with React Native is easy especially for JavaScript developers. Just download the open-source code from Github (http://facebook.github.io/react-native/).