Build native-like mobile apps with React Native
React Native is a framework that uses the popular JavaScript library React JS to describe the user interfaces for native devices. React Native allows you to build applications that run on iOS and Android devices using JavaScript. React JS is maintained by Facebook, Instagram and a large group of developers and corporations. Just within 3 years of inception, React Native has amassed high popularity within the developer community.
One reason for its soaring popularity is that it allows mobile app developers to reuse the code across the web and on mobile. Programmers don’t need to rewrite codes separately for iOS and Android from scratch. But that is not all. React Native comes with a host of other benefits for developers that are increasingly making it a preferred choice for Mobile Apps Development. Read on to find out these benefits: Cross-Platform Compatibility First and foremost, a majority of React Native APIs work across platforms so that most components will work on both iOS and Android. This means you can build full-featured applications that look, work and feel exactly like native apps without all the hard work that is involved in writing platform-specific code. Many times however you may need to create platform specific codes. For instance, the design specs for iOS and Android are different and React Native offers platform-specific modules and file extensions to create this distinction. Reduced Time to Market You can build apps much faster with React Native, using fewer resources and at a lower cost too. In fact, some developers have compared the development time of React vis-à-vis native apps and have found almost a 30% efficiency using open source components. Redux is a predictable state management tool for JavaScript apps. Using Redux with React Native helps develop applications that run consistently in various environments (client, server, and native) and are easy to test. Thus, Redux also helps to reduce the mobile development lifecycle by creating one common data layer for iOS and Android. Direct Updates and CodePush React Native allows developers to push updates to users directly bypassing the app store update cycle. This Live Updates is a big efficiency gain and is possible because of the use of JavaScript. The ability to update all your user apps on the fly makes sure you don’t deal with older version issues and longer approval cycles. Developing native mobile applications with React Native has one very big advantage – Live Updates. Developers can push the updates to the users’ phone without having to go through the app store update cycle. This has been made possible due to the extensive use of JavaScript. Microsoft’s plugin CodePush SDK offers client-side integration and allows developers to swiftly push a dynamic update experience for React Native apps. This delivers the product improvements to your end users instantly, keeping your JavaScript and images synchronized with updates push to the CodePush server. Your app benefits from an offline mobile experience as well as web-like agility due to side-loading updates as soon as they are released. Near Native App Experience React Native delivers the ‘as-native-as-it-gets’ experience for apps that are not specifically coded for each platform. The combination of React and JS ensures smooth and fast loading of the most complex of apps. Since the JS aspect of the code runs on a separate thread, the app’s UI animation doesn’t get affected or doesn’t lag, no matter the weight of the compilation. This is why it is difficult to distinguish React Native apps from native apps. Open Source and Developer friendly Since React Native is open source, it has a wide community support and comes with the opportunity for code inspection. The potential for improving the framework by fixing bugs or adding features is high with an open source platform. React Native is incredibly easy and developer friendly. The React Native team has incorporated some great developer tools and useful error messages to the framework so that there is intelligent debugging tools and error reporting Summary Businesses are always looking at shorter development cycles, quicker deployment times and superior app performance and React Native seems to provide these and many other benefits. It is easy to get started with React Native so several companies and developers are already making the most of it. Have you used React Native yet? Do share your experience with us in the feedback section below.