React Native gives you full freedom to choose the tools, architecture, and extensive libraries for developing a mobile app.
There has been a paradigm shift in mobile-first strategy. This is most often via technology: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and in that context, front end development libraries and frameworks such as React, Flutter, Java, Swift, JQuery Mobile, Python, Mobile Angular UI, and NativeScript are becoming the dominant standard in the mobile app development.
However, there is a lot of confusion surrounding overly marketed development “framework” and “libraries,” especially given the rise of new capabilities in mobile app development technologies. These development frameworks or libraries are not new, but a confluence of digital disruptions has led to an influx of tools and technologies to meet rising demand. Thus, selecting the most appropriate ones is important to achieve business outcomes and deliver successful business innovation. Amongst different frameworks, we are taking a React Native point of view for mobile app development.
What is React Native
As defined on the official website of the project – it is a “JavaScript library for building user interfaces”. React Native is developed by Facebook. It is much older compared with other Mobile App development such as Angular or Flutter. React Native, along with React.js, is used by IT giants such as Facebook, Instagram, Airbnb, Netflix, Soundcloud, and Uber Eats.
Flexibility and Compatibility for Faster Development
React Native gives you full freedom to choose the tools, architecture, and extensive libraries for developing a mobile app.
Compatibility with other libraries
React Native is component-based, which makes it utterly flexible. As a library, it can be paired with almost any other JS library or framework. Moreover, it offers plenty of its own libraries and tools and can be packaged with other programming libraries, facilitating and accelerating the mobile app development process. It also allows you to use 3rd party libraries.
Logical componentization
Components are independent and reusable bits of code. React Native is a component-based library. In fact, it can be used as “blocks” to build an interface. It provides ready-made components to significantly reduce the development cycle and minimize the mobile app development cost. For e.g., if you are building a large-scale mobile app without using any framework, then that would require thousands of lines of code. Using React Native, you do not have to write every line of code. If you need a platform-specific component, you can easily import it into your app. Developers can focus more on the logic and spend less time on styling the components. Moreover, they can easily manage updates and modifications of components.
Code re-usability and cost-effective
React Native can be used for developing a mobile app for platforms or devices such as Android and iOS. It enables you to build native applications over hybrid apps that run on a web-view. Any code written in React Native can be used on multiple mediums. You can write code once and deploy it across many platforms, like Android, iOS, and more, making the project less expensive and more profitable.
Lighter and Faster Performance
Faster Refresh Rate
Using JavaScript capabilities, React Native provides you mobile app experience at lightning speed. No more delays for native builds to finish. The framework is fully capable of handling complex project scenarios. Whether you want to develop native apps, hybrid apps, or specific iOS or Android apps, React Native works perfectly. It is ideal for native-rendered apps for Android and iOS devices.
Innovative User Experience
React Native is one of the top choices of organizations because it gives special attention to designing the UI of the app. It is entirely responsive and has fantastic rendering capabilities. Its responsive components respond to different screen sizes, adjusting its contents into the optimal layout for the given parameters. All these factors contribute deeply to designing innovating user interfaces.
Higher Performance
React Native has an edge in performance due to some unique components. The ListView component is one of the components that help improve the performance and user experience of the app. Further, with React Native, the data-binding process is unidirectional, meaning that bindings are not assigned watchers, and consequently, the workload is reduced. React Native is perfect for managing heavy loads with relative ease.
Easy Integration & Maintenance and Future Proof
Developer friendly
React Native allows you to manage the code according to your desired format. It gives you an option to choose without putting any performance penalty. It does not restrict you from using large models. Developers can spend more time writing modern JavaScript and less time worrying about the framework-specific code. React Native can be written in JavaScript ES6+ combined with JSX script, which consists of an extension for syntax.
Easy to maintain and extend
React Native provides a flexible front-end and a simple and stateless architecture that helps you easily understand code, maintain your app for multiple devices and extend as it grows. You can embed it in other apps, and other applications can also be embedded in React Native. You can integrate with jQuery and Backbone, plus the same concepts can be applied to integrating components with any existing code.
Strong community
Enterprises often consider React Native because its components and libraries are known to meet the needs of professional developers. React Native has a community of millions of developers. This directly benefits others with the availability of ready-made components and solutions. The growing additions of libraries in React Native provides access to a diverse range of components that can be used in mobile app development projects to minimize the implementation time. Moreover, there is continuous support from Facebook, which contributes both to enhancing React Native’s capabilities, resources, and popularity.
Today, React Native is supported by contributions from individuals and companies worldwide, including Callstack, Expo, Infinite Red, Microsoft, and Software Mansion.
Closing Remarks
React Native provides varied methods to mobile application development for startups, SMBs, and small and medium enterprises (SMEs). This framework is quite prevailing and easily adaptable for its growing capabilities, functionality, and usability.
If you care about a mobile app development framework that just needs to be learnt once and can be deployed anywhere? React Native could be the right answer. Though it also depends on your mobile development project specifications, technological preferences, and overall business requirements. But you do not always need to create different code bases all the time when a single codebase can do the job across multiple platforms.
