Mobile app development with React Native

Wondering which cross-platform mobile app solution is the best for your project? Among a bunch of alternatives like Ionic, Apache Cordova/PhoneGap and Xamarin, React Native stands out as a promising technology owing to its impressive features.

React and React Native

React Native was released by Facebook in 2015 as an open-source cross-platform mobile app development framework. It’s API structure is based upon React, the framework for building single-page web applications, open-sourced by Facebook itself two years earlier. Being JavaScript frameworks, they both run on a similar paradigm to render the application content. However, unlike React, React Native does not update the content via manipulating the virtual DOM. Instead, it simply interprets JavaScript code behind the scenes and communicates actions to the native platform through native APIs for each platform. Also, React Native does not use HTML and CSS for creating UI components, but uses prebuilt components to translate into native mobile views for Android and iPhone.

Features of React Native

Native build

Applications built with React Native run in native build environment. This is contrary to Hybrid or HTML5 mobile apps built with Ionic and Apache Cordova/PhoneGap which render in a WebView, i.e., they run in a browser shell having access to the native platform layer.

Cross platform

React Native mobile apps represent cross-platform compatibility. This eliminates the need to develop and maintain separate code bases for iOS and Android versions of the application. Though, React Native also supports native modules, i.e., those written in the native device languages such as Java, Kotlin, C# and Swift. These modules are better for operations which require intensive computing such as access to device peripherals. Also React Native can be used to build applications across a range of devices, including mobile (Android & iPhone), personal computers (macOS, Windows & Linux), television (Android TV & tvOS), UWP & smartwatches.

JSX

React Native, like React, uses the JSX syntax to define the layout of the app. Although, as mentioned earlier, the JSX does not get converted to HTML but its components are translated to invoke native building blocks. The core components of React Native like <View>, <Image> and <Text> are akin to HTML tags <div>, <img> and <p> respectively.

Tools & Extensions

There is a large collection of templates, packages, extensions, and other tools to assist React Native developers. Visual Studio Code, Sublime Text, Atom and all other major code editors are equipped with several extensions and packages that streamline app development. Apart from this, there is a well-organised official documentation for React Native.

Active community

React and React Native are free-to-use and open-source libraries. They are actively being maintained by Facebook as well as a growing community of developers contributing to these projects. As of September 2020, the last stable release was 0.63.3. React Native as much smoother learning curve, especially for web developers, as compared to development with Java, Kotlin, C#, Swift and other native languages. This has enabled developers familiar with web technologies to delve into mobile app development.

Comparison with Natively-coded & Hybrid apps

Being native apps built on top of a JavaScript library, applications built with React Native offer the best of both mobile and web worlds. Speaking differently, being native apps, they have a better access to device features than hybrid mobile apps and being built upon JS, they also support web-specific features which apps written in native code lack. Another benefit of React Native apps is that they outperform cross-platform hybrid apps built with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript which are basically browsers that take longer to load.

Sarvay Xenia has a dedicated team of JavaScript developers who are adept at building web and mobile applications using React, Angular, React Native, Ionic, and  Node. Do contact us for any query regarding your app requirements.