The Technologies Powering React Native

The creation of cross-platform mobile applications has always been fraught with difficulties. React Native offers solutions by bringing the capabilities of JavaScript and React.js to mobile platforms while also promising a consistent developer experience across multiple platforms. While React Native is a very wisely architected cross-platform mobile solution, some of the larger advantages that React Native has over competitors like Flutter are direct results of the technologies that power React Native. Continue reading to explore the power of React Native, the technologies that React Native is built with, and the libraries and frameworks that empower the React Native community.

An Overview of React Native

Is an open-source framework that helps with the creation of cross-platform mobile applications. React Native was created by Facebook and is used to develop mobile apps for both iOS and Android. Many firms are torn between developing native apps and cross-platform apps. The fact is that there are certain situations where native development is more suitable for a company, but in many other situations a cross-platform solution will be a better fit.

Native apps are designed to run only on the platforms they are intended for. Generally, this is a drawback for most companies who want their business apps to be available on both app stores and want to save time releasing an app in one shop only to build a different one in the next. And this is completely reasonable; what business would want to take on the overhead of creating the same app twice? By combining JSX, a mix of XML-like markup and JavaScript to design intuitive and responsive user interfaces, and “bridges” to link to native rendering APIs, a React Native mobile app behaves as if it were totally built from the native UI, on both iOS and Android platforms.

React Native features excellent documentation, a thriving open-source community of thousands of developers, and is downloaded more than a million times every week. It has and continues to power many popular applications, including Facebook, Oculus, Instagram, Soundcloud Pulse, Uber Eats, and others.

Built-In React Native Technologie

React Native uses many technologies to quickly and easily create great user interfaces for cross-platform applications. The tools below enable React Native Developers to create their desired mobile applications in record time.

JavaScript

JavaScript is, of course, a key component of React Native. JavaScript, formerly known as LiveScript, is a dynamic, lightweight scripting language originally designed for Netscape 2.0 and has long been used to generate dynamic and intuitive web pages and applications. For many years, it has also been utilized for many non-web applications, including ApacheCouchDB and Node.js, and development frameworks such as React Native. It is an object-oriented, imperative, and declarative language intended to be user-friendly, concise, and versatile.

JavaScript is the most popular programming language in the world, and that fact comes with a wealth of benefits. On top of that, React is the most popular JavaScript library. Many developers love working with JavaScript and, more specifically, React. A few of the advantages that come with JavaScript are:

• It is easier to find developers that know JavaScript than any other language.

• React Native tends to be more approachable for many web developers since it does not require the learning of an entirely new programming language.

• JavaScript has a very robust community of resources and tooling, which make it easy to work with

JSX

JSX is a language extension that enables web developers to change the DOM with HTML code easily. The code is written by developers in HTML-like syntax. JSX will be very familiar to those that already know CSS, HTML, and JavaScript. It essentially allows you to write HTML and CSS within your JS files. JSX is not a requirement for using React, however, almost all React implementations make use of it. One of the reasons that many developers like JSX, HTML-in-JS, and CSS-in-JS libraries are because of co-location; it allows for JavaScript, HTML, and CSS to exist in one location, arguably making it easier to manage the three to create one cohesive experience.

TypeScript

React Native supports TypeScript for those that want to take advantage of it. TypeScript is a superset of JavaScript. This means that it contains all of the features of JavaScript and adds a few on top. In particular, TypeScript supports static typing. This is a programming language feature that allows you to catch issues with data types before they enter production, making code and applications, more stable. Static typing comes with a handful of benefits beyond stability, including developer performance and code editing tools.

React.js

Over the years, the web has gotten increasingly complex. These days, there is larger demand than ever to create intricate user interfaces and dynamic experiences. Thus, a new wave of JavaScript frameworks has been created to allow developers to create scalable front-end architecture.

React.js is a JavaScript framework that combines the speed of JavaScript with a new method of rendering webpages, resulting in highly dynamic and responsive webpages. The product fundamentally altered Facebook’s development strategy. Following its introduction, the library became immensely popular due to its novel approach to developing user interfaces, establishing the long-running competition between Angular and React, another prominent web development tool.

Today React is the JavaScript framework of choice. Google has announced that they will discontinue support for Angular, and React is more popular than Vue.js, which is a close third in terms of adoption. The ubiquity of React within the JS community gives it a strong community, great documentation, and a large list of software developers that want to work with it. This gives React Native an advantage over other cross-platform mobile app development solutions.

React Native libraries help engineers launch their projects rapidly and deliver React Native apps on time. React Native frameworks make the development process much easier and allow developers to create apps much faster. So, it is necessary to take a comprehensive approach when selecting available solutions and tools before embarking on a new project. Knowing your business needs and project requirements will make this work easier and help you choose the best library.

React Native UI Libraries

We’ve compiled a list of the most popular React Native libraries, each of which can significantly improve development productivity. This list of popular UI libraries can assist you in developing your entire application without worrying about styling and basic functionality.

React Native Paper

React Native Paper is a free and open-source library. All of its essential components are built using Google Material design principles. Paper is cross-platform that allows you to develop interactive web experiences for both mobile and web. There are enough elements and interactions to cover practically every use-case scenario

User interface logic, accessibility, animations, and accessibility are all managed elements. Standard colors can be modified, or you can create your own. You can also switch between light and dark modes.

Feature Highlights

• GitHub star rating of 9.8k
• MIT licensed
• Community support through GitHub issues
• Web compatible via React Native Web
• Provides support for over 30 components

React Native Elements

React Native Elements is an open-source React Native UI toolkit. The cross-platform library has many customizable components, including badge, pricing, platform-specific search bars, overlay, etc. The creators of this library think that component structure is more crucial for React Native than design. Therefore, the developer must use relatively little boilerplate code to make the component usable. Furthermore, the programmer has control over the appearance of the components.

Feature Highlights

• GitHub star rating of 20.7k
• MIT certified
• GitHub problems provide community support
• Full documentation
• Expo support
• Live example

UI Kitten

UI Kitten is another UI library, and it is based on Eva Design System. It attempts to bring consistency and scalability to the design and development process. It comes with 25+ general-purpose UI components, a theming system, a library of 480+ SVG icons, and more.

Feature Highlights

• GitHub star rating of 9.4k
• MIT Licensed
• Full documentation
• Dedicated support for the paid version

NativeBase

NativeBase is a popular UI component set for React Native Development. It is completely open-source and has been used to create a number of intriguing free-to-use projects, including a basic Twitter clone. NativeBase also supports a number of paid premium starter kits that address highly particular themes, such as developing a taxi app similar to Uber.

React Native State Management

State management refers to the persistence and transference of data between components and transitions. State management is a fundamental concept to understand when you are building complex user experiences using any JavaScript framework. In React, there are a few different built-in options for state management. For many applications, React Contexts provide enough functionality to manage the state. However, there are some additional libraries to help when a Context cannot.

Redux

Redux is one of the best React Native state management tools with several distinctive features. You will acquire a completely new concept of data storage while using this program. You can use database features such as select, query, insert, and update.

The best thing about Redux is that you can simply edit live code. Redux can also be included in an existing project. This will be more effective if you add the react state management tool at the start of your project development. It is a one-of-a-kind library that simplifies state management in highly scalable systems.

Redux Saga

Redux-Saga is a react native state management tool that seeks to make applications more efficient to run, simple to test, have side effects easier to manage, and better at dealing with failures. The Redux-working saga’s procedure is similar to an intermediate. It is one of the best React Native libraries available if you are using Redux for state management. The library can be started, paused, and stopped from the key application by means of standard redux actions. It can access the entire redux application state and dispatch redux actions.

Redux Persist

Redux Persist is a React state management tool to persist and rehydrate a redux store. It is a library that allows you to save the redux store to your browser or mobile device’s local storage. It promises to keep the users’ redux state, which most developers find appealing. Redux Persist falls under “JavaScript Utilities & Libraries” and offers ships with react integration as one of its key features.

Many React Native applications utilize Redux Persist for the persistence of data across user sessions. When a user closes a mobile app, you can use Redux Persist to save the state of a Redux store, and when the app is re-opened you can rehydrate the store to restore your old state.

React Native Code Formatting

When developing clean and well-formatted JavaScript code, tools like ESLint and Prettier can save you a lot of time. When properly implemented, these tools ensure that your code is consistent and that everyone on your team adheres to the same set of stylistic standards.

ESLint

ESLint is a JavaScript linting tool that allows developers to identify tricky patterns or code that does not correspond to any particular style requirement. Linting your code can help you detect potential issues. Because JavaScript is dynamically typed, it is easy for developers to create difficult-to-debug runtime issues.

Prettier

Prettier formats your JavaScript and JSX code automatically according to a set of widely approved community styles. It also works well with React Native and other existing tools. Prettier also speeds up code writing by eliminating the need to format your code, making your project more friendly to newbies.

React Native Testing Libraries

Automated testing is extremely important to the scalability of any codebase. It is crucial for developers to have confidence in code refactors or code changes, and without automated tests, you will inevitably see an increase in bug occurrence rates over time. Small faults and unexpected edge situations can cascade into bigger disasters as your codebase grows. Bugs result in a bad user experience and, eventually, business losses. Testing your code before releasing it is one method to avoid fragile programming.

Appium

Appium is a free and open-source tool for automating native, web, mobile, and hybrid apps on Android, iOS, and Windows desktop platforms. In addition, Appium supports cross-platform testing, allowing you to build tests with a single API and run them across various platforms. In a nutshell, Appium enables code reuse across several test suites.

Jest

Jest is a simple JavaScript testing framework. It is a testing framework for resolving faults in the JavaScript source. The library provides DOM access via jsdom. Although jsdom only approximates how the browser works, it is often enough for testing React Native components. In addition, Jest has a fast iteration speed mixed with sophisticated features such as mocking modules and timers, giving you more control over how the code executes.

Detox

Detox is an end-to-end (E2E) testing library for React Native apps. It can be used to simulate user behavior and test apps automatically to see how users react to them. It also supports permissions, notifications, various device setups, and whatever else the user could want to do with the app.

React Native CI/CD Solutions

CI/CD (Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment) is a means of delivering apps to clients frequently by integrating automation into the stages of app development. CI/CD bridges the gap between operations teams and development by mandating application development, testing, and deployment automation. We’ll look at some of the top React Native CI/CD solutions for mobile app developers in this section.

GitHub Actions

GitHub Actions, a platform component, naturally supports CI/CD. It has been the solution for automating tests and deployments in CI pipelines because of its simple YAML configuration, large community support, and reasonable pricing. Although React Native works well with tools like Bitrise or Fastlane to set up near-zero-configuration Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment pipelines, using GitHub for DevOps requirements will help to reduce both friction points and decentralization by focusing the entire mobile development workflow into one single platform.

CIRCLE CI

Because centralizing CI/CD is easier than configuring different services, it’s an excellent solution for existing projects that you may already be using for a web/backend project. CircleCI supports React Native (through Linux and macOS containers), but it’s not free to use. CircleCI is a free service for open-source projects (including public projects on GitHub).

Here you can check an overview of CircleCI on Android.

App Center

Visual Studio App Center is a service that offers a variety of capabilities to help you enhance your products, including continuous integration, analytics, continuous delivery, crash analytics, and over-the-air (OTA) upgrades. With built-in React Native support, it couldn’t be easier to automatically develop, test, package, and distribute React Native apps for Android and iOS.

Other React Native Technologies

Expo

Expo is another tool worth mentioning. Expo is a React Native developer toolchain that is open source. Expo is essentially a programming environment; it includes a lot of different features and packages to make the creation of cross-platform React Native apps quicker. Speed is the name of the game with Expo. However, Expo does come with negative qualities as well, such as larger app sizes and package bloat.

Firebase

Firebase is a BaaS app development platform that offers hosted backend services like authentication, cloud storage, real-time database, analytics, and crash reporting. It is built on Google’s infrastructure and automatically scales. As a React Native developer, you can use Firebase to start constructing an MVP (minimum viable product) while keeping costs down and prototyping the application quickly.

React Native Maps

The React Native Maps repo is useful for programmers that need highly customizable map components for their Android or iOS React Native projects. They may easily alter the map view areas, markers, and styles and do fantastic things using this library to improve user experience. In addition, front-end developers appreciate this tool’s ease of use and documentation. So, it’s no surprise that this solution has 12.2k ratings on GitHub.

React Native Vector Icons

React Native Vector Icons is exactly what it sounds like — a library of vector icons. It is excellent for logos, buttons, and navigation or tab bars. These vector icons are incredibly simple to design and incorporate into a project. Vector icons add visual appeal to a presentation, making it more appealing. Vector icons communicate more information than ordinary letters. The icon color and size can be changed, and numerous stylistic options are available. In addition, icons can be completely customized. These vector icons can be found almost anywhere.

What Can We Do with React Native?

As the popularity of mobile apps grows, creators and businesses seek to increase efficiency while lowering development expenses. A smartphone application should appeal to both Android and IOS users for optimal efficiency. This may present issues because these applications must be designed and developed individually. Native has a role to play in this situation. React Native provides businesses with early user input for their products by providing fast, high-performance applications and MVPs. In addition, React Native is nimble, allowing you to adjust your applications to market changes across two platforms swiftly.

Summary

Many businesses choose React Native for their mobile development needs because of its freedom and flexibility, as well as its stability, supportive community, and big skill pool. In addition, the entire ecosystem includes numerous valuable tools and allows us to choose the technological stack for our application. React is doing an excellent job of handling the UI of our application.

Frontend developers will find React Native easier to learn and code with than Angular. It’s more stable than Vue.js, with a wider community and talent pool. In the end, it is a terrific cross-platform framework that saves you time and money when developing an app for many platforms.

Are you ready to unleash the potential of React Native? Set up a free consultation with Flatirons today to improve your business’s mobile presence!

Here you can check a complete guide to React Native.