Everything you need to know about reacts native app development
The popularity of React Native is on the rise in recent times. The JavaScript framework, developed by Facebook Team, is the reason behind the success of Facebook, Instagram, and Skype mobile apps.
React Native is a JavaScript framework to natively render mobile applications for iOS, Android, and Universal Windows Platform. As the name suggests, it is based on React, but it doesn’t target the browser. Instead, the platform is ideal for mobile platforms.
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, which means that your app will consist of real mobile UI components, not webview. Your app will just 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.
What are the advantages of React Native?
JavaScript
React Native uses JavaScript, one of the widely-used and fastest programming languages. This means that typically you can find React Native developer relatively quickly.
Updates
Developers can 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, mobile application development is the combination of JavaScript, HTML, and CSS, which we typically render using web views. This approach works, but it comes with drawbacks around performance.
Some frameworks try to mimic native UI elements, but it results in a let-off. Creating details like animations may take a lot of time, effort and can become irrelevant quickly.
React Native has it all. 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 separately from the UI, which means that your applications will maintain high performance without sacrificing capability. Web developers can write mobile apps with the performance, look and feel of a native application, while using familiar tools.
Cross-Platform
Working with React Native reduces the resources needed to build mobile applications. Developers familiar with React can easily pick up React Native and target both Web and mobile platforms with the same skillset.
The code can be shared across other supported platforms. Depending on the functionality of your app, not all the code you write will be cross-platform. However, if the app is a requirement for both iOS and Android choosing React Native will save you a lot of time, money and lines of code.
Hot Reload
React Native attempts to bring the best developer experience by saving the time it takes to make the changes visible by introducing hot reload.
React Native is a strong competitor to native app development of mobile apps. It’s a framework with various benefits to the developers, as well as the company. React Native can be written in JavaScript and then launched on iOS and Android platforms making cross-platform app development much easier, faster, and cost-effective.
