It took the tech world by storm by offering a way to develop mobile apps for both iOS and Android simultaneously and for several years now, React Native has been a hot topic in the mobile development world. No wonder


React Native – one framework to rule them all

What are its top advantages and biggest drawbacks? How is it different from other cross-development platforms? nAnd last but not least – what do your developers need to be aware of before they embark on the React Native journey?

React Native has been successfully adopted by hundreds of businesses worldwide, including Uber, Microsoft, and Facebook, and is used across a whole range of industries. In the following article, we’ll answer these and other questions – all so you can make an educated choice

What is React Native?

React Native was first released by Facebook as an open-source project in 2015. In just a couple of years, it became one of the top solutions used for mobile development. React Native (also known as RN) is a popular JavaScript-based mobile app framework that allows you to build natively-rendered mobile apps for iOS and Android.

What is cross-platform development?

Cross-platform is considered the holy grail of software development – you can build your codebase once and then run it on any platform, as opposed to software built natively for a specific platform. Cross-platform development is the practice of building software that is compatible with more than one type of hardware platform. A cross-platform application can run on Microsoft Windows, Linux, and macOS, or just two of them.

How does React Native work?

How does this communication work? React Native uses a so-called “bridge”. While JavaScript and Native threads are written in completely different languages, it’s the bridge feature that makes bidirectional communication possible.

Now that we’ve discussed cross-platform development, let’s take a look at the mechanics of React Native, and how it’s different from anything we’ve seen before.

What makes React Native unique?

The difference between React Native and other cross-platform development solutions (for example, Cordova and PhoneGap) is that React Native doesn’t render WebViews in its code. It runs on actual, native views and components.

Examples of apps built with React Native

Skype

Skype is another good example of a React Native mobile app. In 2017, Skype announced that it was building a completely new app based on React Native. The new app was completely redesigned, from the icons to the new messaging interface, which now has three conversation sections: find, chat, and capture.

Facebook

Facebook aimed to bring all the web development benefits to mobile, like quick iterations and having a single product development team, and this is how React Native came to life.

Instagram

Instagram decided to integrate React Native into its existing native app, starting with the Push notification view that originated as the WebView.


Walmart

Previously, some parts of the Walmart app featured embedded web views, which – as Walmart Labs pointed out – fell below “the standard that both we and our customers demand.”