React Native for Cross-platform App Development

Brief about React Native

React Native, in simple terms, is a javascript library that is used by developers for building UI. React native is mainly for taking care of look and feel of your entire application. It consists of code that describes how a certain area of your application will look like with the dynamic data that is retrieved. Lets talk in detail about how it works and why it should be used.

Why use React Native?

Few years ago react native was relatively new and had limited use with people not being sure of its range. When Facebook built its Ads manager app feature entirely using react native, people started taking react native seriously for cross platform development. Facebook ads manager needs no introduction and works perfectly fine with android as well as iOS. 

With react native, you save a lot of work and code that you would be doing twice for managing cross platforms. React uses standard HTML tags. With iPhone most of the code is written in C and with android it is more of javascript so rather than rewriting the code, it is appealing to use react native where it would be easy to create many UI surfaces with lot of components like tables, graphs etc available readymade with their own appearance in react and react rendering it for you. Using this readymade views that react native offers, work can be more productive.

It is native

React was initially developed to work with native apps. Now it includes development for both android and iPhone that makes hybrid app development feasible easily. The basic idea of react native is building blocks that can be used as reusable pieces of code tat can be compiled into native. React native is more of a web-style of approach for mobile app development which helps to render look and features of a native app. Hence more developers are getting inclined towards react native development these days.

Handling multiple platforms

React handles multiple platforms most beautifully. The main idea is to write single piece code that works for both iOS and android. It is possible that for some sections you way want to write seperate codes for both platforms because you need to use a platform specific API. Thats feasible too. With react, you can specify platform specific versions and then combine those components and integrate them in your react native application. 

React also offers a great experience to the developer in terms of code checking and error reporting. You can use standard debugging tools like you do in web development. 

If you are looking for a mobile app development company that knows how to use reactJS effective for both iPhone app development as well as android app development, contact us at info@solutionanalysts.com