Why Facebook’s React Native Is the Future of Hybrid App Development
In the world of mobile application development, a developer always looks for smaller development cycles, quicker time to deployment, and better app performance. With two operating systems dominating the landscape, businesses creating mobile applications often face a compromise: apps that provide a better user experience, or apps that are faster to develop and run on more platforms and devices?
At the crossways of user experience and easiness of development of the hybrid mobile app—an app built with technology and many developers already know (like JavaScript, or HTML5 and CSS) that are wrapped in a container allowing it to run natively on a device.
Hybrid app frameworks have come a long way to link the gap between the performance of a native app and the ease of development of a web app. On the leading edge of this technology is Facebook’s React Native user interface (UI) design framework. Have a look at this article and know how this impressive JavaScript library is upping the bet for hybrid mobile apps.
REUSABLE COMPONENTS ALLOW HYBRID APPS TO RENDER NATIVELY
Vanished are the WebView components of other hybrid mobile apps. This is possible because React Native’s building blocks are reusable “native components” that compile directly to native. Components which the developer can use in iOS or Android and have counterparts right in React.
This component-based structure also allows the developer to build apps with a more agile, web-style approach to development than typical hybrid frameworks. The application will have the speed, appearance, and functionality of a native mobile application.
APPLY REACT NATIVE UI COMPONENTS TO AN EXISTING APP’S CODE
This is a massive bonus for businesses that want to augment an existing app but do not want to refurbish it. Incorporate React Native components into the developer’s app’s code or, if the developer’s existing hybrid app was built with Cordova and Ionic, reuse that Cordova-based code easily with a plugin.
REACT NATIVE IS ALL ABOUT THE UI
React Native is focused specially on building a mobile UI. As compared with JavaScript frameworks such as AngularJS or MeteorJS, React Native is UI-focused, making it more like a JavaScript library than a framework. The resulting UI is highly responsive and feels thanks to asynchronous JavaScript interactions with the native environment. This means the application will have quicker load times than a typical hybrid app, and a smoother feel.
NATIVE APP DEVELOPMENT IS MORE EFFICIENT
Whereas native app development is usually associated with inefficiency, less developer productivity, and slower time to deployment, React Native is all about bringing the speed and agility of web app development to the hybrid space with native results.
Under React Native’s cowl is Facebook’s popular ReactJS UI library for web applications. React Native brings all of ReactJS’s better app performance, DOM abstraction, and simplified programming methods to hybrid mobile development.
IOS AND ANDROID COVERED
Initially, Facebook only developed React Native to support iOS. However with its latest support of the Android operating system, the library can now render mobile UIs for both the platforms. Facebook used React Native to build its own Ads Manager app, creating both an iOS and an Android version. Both versions were built by the same team of developers.
Facebook also made React Native open-source, with the idea that compatibility with other platforms such as Windows or tvOS could be worked on by the development community.