What Exactly Is React Native?

React Native is a popular JavaScript-based mobile app framework developed by Facebook (company behind both ReactJS and React Native) for creating native-style apps for IOS & Android under one common language. If you’ve ever used the Facebook app on Android or IOS, you’ve seen React Native in action.

React Native was developed in 2013 as a Facebook’s internal hackathon project and In March of 2015 they released it for public use. In just a couple of years, it became one of the top solutions used for mobile development.

Facebook, Instagram, and Airbnb all these big tech companies have built their latest versions of mobile apps using React Native. You can visit React Native’s website to see a list of other companies that currently use React Native in their applications. There is a rich community of React Native developers and overtime there are plenty of courses available online to get started with React Native.

“Google Trends says React Native’s framework popularity has grown during the previous three years. That is very remarkable and it’s not expected to end.”

Initially developed React Native to support IOS, Facebook quickly followed it up with Android support, the library can now render mobile UI s for both platforms. And in 2019 Microsoft announced its plans of incorporating React Native Framework for window’s desktop application. React Native is a great pick for those developers who have expertise in JavaScript as there is no need to learn things like Objective-C, Kotlin or Swift.

React Native development is simple, super fast and efficient compared to lots of mobile development frameworks out there. When we talk about the advantages you will understand how it helps to speed up the development process.

How does React Native work?

Let’s have a look how React Native works under the hood, which will help us understand how JavaScript is compiled to a Native code and how the whole process works.

There are two important threads running in each React Native application, the JavaScript one and the Native one. Both of these threads are able to share information. They communicate using a “bridge”, the part that provides a way for bidirectional and asynchronous communications between these two realms. With the help of this bridge, React Native can ask native code to provide the native elements it needs.

Let's take a look at the following diagram, which explains how the bridge works:

What makes React Native special ?

Difference between React Native and other cross-platform frameworks (Ionic, Cordova) is that React Native doesn’t render Web Views in its code. It comes with Native Modules and Native components that improve performance. If there is a feature that you need to add in your app that is not yet supported by the React Native library then in that case you can write your own Native Module using a platform specific language which can then be linked to the React Native codebase.

Let’s take a sneak peek into some of the advantages of using REACT Native framework and why you should choose it as a solution to build your next mobile application.

Code reusability

Code reusability is an important advantage React Native gives over others. You can minimize a lot of duplicate code by simply sharing logic across web an mobile versions of an application. With the convenience of this framework, you don’t have to build the same application for IOS and Android, separately as React Native allows your developers to reuse the common logic layer.

Live reload

Developer experience is awesome with react native because you can get a fast feedback with it. Instead of recompiling you can reload an app instantly, By making use of its Hot reloading feature. The development time also improves by reloading the application automatically as the code changes. This is one of the most special features of React Native.

Large developer community

React Native has a large community of developers. In React Native you use JavaScript and it is the most commonly used programming language in the world. If you are facing any issues in the development process, you have high chances of getting the right kind of help from the community and experts thereby saving some amount of development time. It also means you get to have a more approachable access to great developers and their experience.

Cost efficiency

React Native apps lower your development and maintenance costs, because you don’t have to deal with two separate code bases for each platform.

So that means you don’t have to hire two teams with different skill sets to finalize your project, a small team is enough to build it.

For a organization React Native is a much more cost-effective development approach than building separate apps from the ground up for different programming environments.

React Native Drawbacks

Like any other technology React Native also comes with its share of limitations. Most of the issues are now getting addressed by React Native’s community but there are some that you need to be aware of before you decide on developing a React Native app.

Let’s focus on some of its major cons:

Ready-made Components Small Collection

React Native is newbie as compared to other Android and IOS programming languages and at the moment the ready-made components collection is quite small. That limits developers to creating very basic simple apps.

So, no matter what app you are trying to build always look whether third-party solutions are available or not.

Third-party components

React Native has lot of third party plugins to choose from since the main framework lacks certain components. And some of them might behave not quite as you’ve expected and open source libraries for React Native aren’t always well-tested. What you should also know is that React Native update often happens more frequently. And when that happens, third-party libraries often get outdated.

Native Developers Still Needed

In some cases, developers can’t limit themselves to writing code only in React Native. They might need to use an additional native code for components that aren’t compatible with React Native. The implementation of some more advanced features requires Java/Objective-C/Swift expertise. So you’ll still occasionally need some assistance from native developers.

Final Thoughts

React Native is a great selection for creating apps that will work smoothly irrespective of the platform or system they run on. Small Start-ups are also turning towards the React-Native Framework because of the reasons I have mentioned. The limitations of React Native mentioned above are the ones which are commonly experienced by it’s community. Currently the Facebook crew is upgrading React Native so it can resolve a lot of the issues with the framework.

Last but not least, React Native is a good choice for most use cases unless you have some specific platform issues.

“learn once, write anywhere”