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React Native is used across several industries and has been successfully adopted by hundreds of businesses globally, such as Microsoft, Facebook, and Uber to name a few. Before diving in headfirst with React Native use for your project, it's imperative that you fully comprehend its operation and determine whether it fits within its functionality. What are its primary benefits and drawbacks, which platforms offer cross-development support, and what should developers know before using React Native? We will address these and any other queries in an upcoming blog post to enable you to determine for yourself whether React Native is best suited to meet the needs of your company.
What Is React Native?
React Native, commonly referred to as React is an established framework for creating natively rendered mobile apps on iOS and Android that run JavaScript. With React Native, you can leverage one codebase across multiple platforms, saving time and effort. Facebook first made React Native available as an open-source project, quickly rising to become the go-to solution for mobile development solutions in a matter of years. Today, it powers some of the most acclaimed applications, such as Instagram, Facebook, and Skype; we will explore their respective uses further in this post.
React Native's incredible success can be attributed to various factors.
- Employing React Native, businesses can save time and resources by writing code once for iOS and Android apps using one codebase - providing significant time- and resource-savings opportunities.
- Second, React, an established JavaScript library when React Native was unveiled, was its core building block. Here, we investigate in more depth any differences between React and React Native.
- Thirdly, this framework allowed frontend developers formerly limited to web technologies to produce mobile apps ready for release into production efficiently.
React Native originates in an error within technology itself - much like many groundbreaking innovations. It was born as a solution.
What Distinguishes React From React Native?
React JS (JavaScript library), commonly referred to by its initials RX or React Native framework for creating native mobile applications using JavaScript, is designed to aid app developers when rendering user interface elements of mobile applications. React serves as the MVC framework's V section; thus, its only duty is to display viewpoints. Meanwhile, React Native provides developers an environment where native applications may be built using React. With React Native compiling into native app components, enabling app creators to craft native mobile applications
What exactly are the significant distinctions?
React is used as the base abstraction of React DOM (Document Object Model) on web and mobile platforms when working with React Native to create mobile applications using React. While different components exist between React Native and native React, their syntax and workflow remain identical.
How Is React-Native Implemented?
To truly grasp how React Native works, one must understand how its compilers interact with various compilers across platforms. React Native has quickly gained attention since its debut. Many consider React Native an essential development platform that lets mobile application developers run JavaScript code within mobile environments without using web views as part of development, unlike Phonegap or Ionic, which depend upon web views instead.
React Native makes creating mobile applications simple by providing native UI components while developing UIView instances that mirror development for specific platforms with native mobile app development languages. One important thing to remember when using Dartlang for app development by Google is that the JavaScript code is converted to an Abstract Syntax Tree (AST), making the code compatible across devices.
React Native takes an unconventional approach. React Native has some significant drawbacks, such as building new compilers to target different platforms and compilation using JS code as input. Current compilers can only target particular platforms; Java, for instance, targets Android platforms, whereas Objective-C and Swift only focus on iOS platforms. One key advantage to adopting such a strategy is that compilers tailored explicitly for those platforms provide superior compilation results.
The History Of React Native
Facebook initially used an HTML5-based mobile webpage when making its service accessible on mobile devices rather than developing native applications like many major tech firms. Unfortunately, however, this solution proved temporary, with plenty of opportunities for improvement on user experience and performance enhancements available to it. A Facebook developer, made a groundbreaking discovery shortly after that: using JavaScript to generate user interface elements for iOS applications was revolutionary enough for it to spark widespread excitement; an unprecedented hackathon ensued to gauge precisely how far mobile development could be carried out with solutions using this language which until that moment had primarily been web-based solutions.
That led Facebook to develop React Native. Within months of debuting it to the public, React Native had already expanded support to Android devices after initially only supporting iOS platforms. React Native quickly became the second-most contributor-rich project within three years based on contributor count alone with over 9,100 contributors.
React Native App Examples
React Native is being adopted by numerous well-known businesses for use in mobile app development today among them are Walmart, Facebook, Instagram, Blomberg & SoundCloud, among many more.
Walmart
With Walmart's app, customers can browse merchandise, compare costs, place orders, and complete transactions seamlessly. React Native development was chosen because output and time-to-market were among their primary considerations. What were their results? They achieved near-native performance with near-zero resource consumption by sharing 95% of code between iOS and Android platforms.
Facebook Ads
Facebook Ads was the inaugural Android application to use React Native exclusively and entirely depend upon this technology. It created an easy and user-friendly user interface with React Native's use by its engineering team. What was their objective? They demanded lightning-fast performance.
Instagram decided to integrate React Native into their native app's push notifications view; according to Instagram's team, up to 85-89% of iOS and Android code could be shared between platforms.
Also Read: React Native: The Ultimate Guide for this year - Worth the Investment?
React Native Pros And Cons
Pros Of React Native
Time Efficiency
React Native uses Hot Reload to make it easy for developers like yourself to see changes made to code instantly and preview these updates, speeding up the development of apps faster.
Performance
React Native improves performance by making use of native controls and modules. Direct rendering can be improved by using native API components for iOS or Android platforms; additionally, its use enables separate threads from its user interface thread, allowing for increased performance.
Growing Community
React Native is quickly growing more popular thanks to a robust community. Achieve rapid expansion while simultaneously giving developers access to valuable learning tools via discussion boards or online resources is possible with support from such an open platform as React Native.
Reduces cost of app development
React Native is a cross-platform framework that enables programmers to create applications that run across several platforms with just one piece of code - for instance, on iOS and Android - significantly cutting development costs considerably. Cross-platform frameworks help reduce labor costs further through their requirement of hiring fewer developers.
Reliable And Stable Apps
React Native uses data binding to ensure the stability and dependability of apps created with its framework. Data binding ensures modifications to child elements do not adversely impact parent data structures. Developers know that to modify any object successfully, they must first alter its state before modifying those changes - this way, only specific parts will benefit.
Cons Of React Native
Only Some Components Are Available
React Native is still a relatively young framework, so there aren't many pre-existing components out there to support advanced features in an app that they don't support. Developers who want to implement them must create custom ones from scratch to do so successfully.
Native Code Required
Even though React Native is cross-platform, that does not imply it should be utilized when developing every app feature. Developers will ultimately need to make modifications using native code when editing generated code generated from React Native. Native code may be necessary to access specific hardware features, like cameras and microphones; this increases costs significantly during development - something many would find quite annoying.
Slow App Performance Compared To Native Applications
React Native is capable of creating robust applications with cutting-edge features. Therefore, React Native may also be appropriate for apps containing standard functionality.
Substandard 3rd Party Components
As there aren't many React Native apps components readily available, developers have more freedom to create their own. Third-party components exist as third-party options, but some could compromise the security of an app.
Security Issues
Because React Native is built upon the JavaScript Library, it can be susceptible to vulnerabilities and fragilities similar to its parent. During code development, extra care must be taken to remove any suspicious code fragments that could compromise user security.
Creating Your React Native App
This section will help you build your first React Native app. Before developing our application on OSX as our building platform, we must first prepare our environment.
Step 1: Prerequisites & Dependencies Installation
- Installing Node, Watchman, Xcode, cocoapods, and the React Native command line interface is the first step.
- To install Node & Watchman with Homebrew, follow these steps.
- Installing Node. brew
- Install Watchman in Brew
- Ensure Node 8.3 or later is installed on your system if it still needs to be installed.
- Ensure Xcode 9.4 or newer is installed on your system if it's already installed.
Step 2: Install NodeJS Python Jdk8
Make sure that JDK8 and Python NodeJS are installed.
Step 3: Install React Native CLI (Optional)
- To install the react native command line interface on cpm, use the install –g react-native-cli command.
- Installing react-native-cli using npm
Step 4: Create your React Native Project
- To initiate the creation of your project, use the commands below.
- To access this project, install the AwesomeProject via React-Native in Desktop OSX 10.10/10.11.6.
- This command creates the following folder.
- Use these commands to build your project with React Native of any version.
Step 5: Running The React Native Project
- Execute this command to launch your React Native project.
- Use iOS in AwesomeProject on Desktop
- React-native run on IOS AwesomeProject $
Step 6: Install Android Studio
- First, download the Android Studio from the official page.
- Install Android Studio after downloading.
Step 7: Configure AVD Manager
To start the configuration, use the AVD icon manager.
Step 8: Choose The Device Option
- Choose the picture of the device.
- After the system image is installed, launch the Android enumerator.
Step 9: Run Android
Launch Android and navigate the Sample project folder using these commands: AwesomeProject$ react-nativerunandroid; this command displays an Android Enumerator and displays as such.
The Future Of React Native development
Facebook continues to support React Native, creating anxiety among businesses as this dependence could jeopardize their operations at any moment. On a positive note, however, independent developers currently contribute over 60% of React Native code.
Facebook continues to invest heavily in React Native. As its popularity gradually rises, any threats appear even less severe. Issues are addressed quickly via releases, while community suggestions are taken up swiftly. React Native is currently working to decrease its API surface area to make apps faster and develop the JavaScript engine Hermes, which should enhance Android performance further.
Important lessons have been learned Due to community contributions, investment by Facebook, and constant releases and updates by React Native developers. Its success remains strong. React Native's architecture is continually being modified. React Native will undergo a complete redesign with support for native modules, renderer improvements, and initialization enhancements.
Conclusion
Since you already understand CIS’s expertise in developing React Native apps, let's discuss how we can assist your company. CIS brings software development expertise and has completed projects of various sizes and levels of complexity to each business need, offering solutions tailored specifically for them with our in-house cross-platform and native developers.
