In recent years, cross-platform mobile development has become an excellent alternative to native mobile applications both for developers and clients of software companies. The thing is that if you decide to choose a native mobile app, you’ll have to deal with all the consequences of creating separate applications for each target platform. The approach has its advantages, but can be considered as an option that requires significant time and money investments. The cross-platform development, in its turn, is an alternative allowing you to cut costs thanks to the possibility to use once written source code among multiple platforms.
Both described approaches have pros and cons, and their description lays beyond this article, and you can decide for yourself if a native or hybrid app will work better for your business. What we’d like to do today is to cover the benefits of using React Native for cross-platform mobile development. At the moment, it’s one of the most popular technologies that, most probably, will become one of the options to choose from if you decide to become a proud owner of a cross-platform mobile app.
What’s React and What Makes it “Native”?
After its first release back in 2013, React (previously known as React JS), has become one of the most popular and widely used JavaScript tools. It was developed by the Facebook company, so you can imagine how much attention it attracted. Such features as Virtual DOM and isomorphic JavaScript allowed React to become a decent choice for developers who intended to create blazing fast and reliable web applications.
React Native, in its turn, is a framework that helps to leverage the advantage of React for creating cross-platform mobile apps. Developers can use it to create full-featured applications for Android and iOS that will function like native apps. End-users won’t feel any difference between mobile apps based on React Native and native apps built with Java, Objective-C, or other technologies. Such apps use the same UI building components as native ones but allow achieving faster development speed for lower prices. Tech giants, such as Instagram, Tesla, Bloomberg, Skype, and many others, use React Native for their mobile solutions. To understand why, let’s shed some light on the main benefits that React Native can provide.
How React Native Won People’s Hearts
As a business owner, you have to do your best to improve your ROI. Time and money are the most significant factors for startup companies. The fast return will help to survive in the competitive technological market and provide a basis for future growth. Therefore, the ability to develop faster and for lower prices can become an important competitive advantage. React is the exact component that can help you to achieve these goals. React JS development companies provide the ability to develop a mobile application for multiple platforms, which allows covering the widest possible number of end-users for a reasonable price and in a short time. Using the same code for Android and iOS devices, you can achieve a great outcome in terms of audience reach without significant efforts.
Reusable code and a wide variety of ready-to-use components significantly increase the importance of React for businesses that value their time and money. With React, developers don’t have to build a separate mobile app for each target platform. The lion’s share of React source code can be used again for another mobile app, both for Android and iOS. Here’s some more great news. If you already have a web app built with React, its code can be used for creating a mobile version of the application. A wide range of pre-built React components includes almost everything a mobile app developer might want to use in the project. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel. Instead, developers can take a free-to-use component and adapt it to the need of the project. As you have guessed, such an approach can provide your company with even more time saved.
React helps to achieve better performance for mobile apps compared to more “traditional” solutions such as PhoneGap. PhoneGap uses WebView, which results in low performance. As an alternative, you can choose React Native. As a result, you’ll get the possibility to render components with native APIs. The use of a separate thread from UI also has a positive impact on the overall performance.
React Native is a pretty popular open-source technology among mobile app developers from all around the world. All documentation is open and free-to-use for everyone, which allows building a solid React community. If a developer faces an unexpected issue during the working process, community experts will be glad to provide some solutions. Mobile app developers can share their experience, discuss issues they face on a daily basis, encourage each other to write better code, and constantly evolve.
React Native has a modular architecture, which means that the functionality of a mobile app can be separated into several independent modules. Such an approach allows reaching great flexibility within the team of developers. Each specialist can delve into the part of the colleague’s project if needed and provide some updates. This feature of React Native helps to upgrade mobile applications quickly, which is especially important after the launch of the app when users are very sensitive to bugs.
Since we’ve already mentioned users, let’s talk about the look and feel of your app. The good news about React Native is that despite you don’t develop a native app, it still runs like a native one. The components from which your mobile app consists of are compiled to their roots that are native platforms. The fundamental units of React Native are open to serve all demands for mobile gadgets. Thus, it performs lucratively under the mobile environment.
Last but not least, React is here to stay. It doesn’t seem that the popularity of this technology is some kind of a passing fashion trend. User-friendly documentation and timely assorted framework are some of the main reasons why developers adore this technology. Each day, the framework is developed more and more, providing solutions for nowadays issues.
Conclusions
With React Native, Facebook, once in a long time, made something good. At the moment, React Native provides a countless number of useful features and remains too big to stay unnoticed. Like any other technology for mobile app development, it has its strong and weak sides, so it’s better to weigh all pros and cons before adopting it as a part of your technological stack. What we can say for sure is that the list of advantages makes this technology very promising not to pay extra attention to it.
To learn more about React Native and the benefits it can provide, you can get a free consultation from our specialists.
