App development is always a challenging task as you need to consider the platform and tooling. Every business enterprise looks for fast deployment, a quick development cycle, and outstanding performance. Currently, two parameters dominate the market scenario, and the mobile app developers must focus on a better user experience with a fast development cycle.
This can be achieved with an application framework, reducing the gap between the operating systems. Luckily, there are hybrid app frameworks to focus on the user experience and development cycle. React Native has turned out to be the first platform designed to build hybrid apps with native user experiences because of its innovative features and being native on every single platform.
React Native was introduced by Facebook in the year 2015 and is the most well-known framework available to perform all development tasks. Many reputed brands, including Airbnb, Tesla, Wix, Walmart, Instagram, and Bloomberg, are already using React Native framework on a wide scale.
What is React Native?
React Native is a cross-platform framework highly popular for mobile app development, allowing developers to build truly native apps and doesn’t compromise users’ experiences. It is based on JavaScript! React Native integrates native development with React, a best-in-class JavaScript library.
React Native has witnessed a huge growth in its popularity since its introduction in 2015. It also unlocks a plethora of opportunities for developers. The platform addresses the major challenge of separately managing codebase for Android and iOS. It facilitates the maintenance of a single code base for your mobile apps.
React Native comprise of lightweight components, and many enterprises use the framework to build and ship their mobile apps. Popular apps including Facebook, Instagram, Skype, Discord, Shopify, Tesla, Call of Duty, Salesforce, Pinterest, and Bloomberg are React Native based. Whether you are an Android, or an iOS developer React Native has an outstanding collection of features to help you build beautiful apps.
Key factors of React Native Framework
Let’s check out the important factors that make React Native Mobile App Development a robust and highly popular service within the developer community.
- Native Code Compatibility
React Native works on the fact that mobile apps developed with it works similar to native apps. Developers knows that the React Native popularity lies in its behavior, usability and animations, accelerations, with components including keyboard, UI screen and many more. It delivers remarkable performance with native components, guaranteeing seamless operation of most apps and outperforming native apps. Based on JavaScript, the framework helps you build the most robust apps.
- Reduced Development Time
React Native allows development of mobile apps at a much faster rate. With the availability of a huge community in the last few years, the open-source project provides several components that can be integrated locally. This results into 40% shorter development time for developers. Also, React Native covers both Android and iOS version, providing the ease of shared data with a single code base for both platforms.
- Improved User Interface
Whether you work for your web application or a client, focusing on the user experience is crucial. If the interface of the app is not appealing to deliver an outstanding experience, your efforts are useless. Reputed app developers, including Call of Duty, Instagram and Shopify, make use of the React Native framework to build a compelling interface. With an engaging interface, users are more interested to enjoy your apps.
In 2021, with diverse capabilities the future of mobile apps is bright with React. Beginner-friendly integration, lower development time and cost, minimum maintenance and offline support are major benefits worth discussing. React Native is set to be a major part of the future of mobile app development.
- Robust Compatibility with Platforms
Initially, React Native was introduced for iOS. Facebook come to know about its remarkable features and capabilities and provided support for Android too. Most of the APIs in React Native are cross-platform supported. This empowers developers to build both Android and iOS apps using a single codebase. In addition, providing platform-specific compatibility and experience to the app is also present.
- Live Updates
Live updates is an essential feature needed by the developers ever since they were introduced. It comprises of extensive integration of JavaScript, allowing developers to push only the needed updates to the app, even while building the apps. This lowers the development time to a great extent and also eliminates the necessity for app store updates. This way, the end users always interact with the current version of the mobile app without worrying about incompatibility with outdated versions. The overall experience becomes smooth and streamlined with the React Native framework.
- Hot Reloading with Small Teams
While building a mobile app with React Native, any developer can customize the source code while observing the results instantly. The hot reloading feature enables the app to reload instantly once any change is made within the code. In this way, the mobile app developers can build an app without any need of recompilation. One single approach will help both the React Native platforms, and thus, a small group of developers are outsourced to build the app. This helps to perform the whole app development process in a simple and reasonable manner. It also enables a developer to build Web apps at the same time. They just have to share the codes between Android, and iOS platforms for smooth running.
- Virtual DOM
One feature that differentiates React Native from other frameworks is the virtual DOM. An important requirement to build an app is the presence of user interaction and data updates. This needs careful consideration how your mobile app structure is going to impact overall performance. Even with fast platforms and JavaScript engines, implementing DOM creates a performance bottle-neck and results into an annoying user experience. The reason for the same is DOM is a tree-structured, changes at the top level can end into ripples to the user interface.
React manages this concern with the implementation of the virtual DOM. Any new changes made are performed on the virtual DOM, which stays in memory and not reflected on the screen. Algorithm helps to identify the changes made to the virtual DOM that are later integrated to the real DOM.
So, these are the key features of React Native helpful for the app developers. But without React best practices it is impossible to build an engaging application.
- Keep Components Small
As we all know, with React Native, components are smoothly integrated to perform multiple tasks. But as per the expert suggestions keeping components small is crucial, so that one component defines one function. There are several benefits related with it:
- Each small component is reusable.
- Components are easily available to the community.
- Small components help in performance optimizations.
- It takes a few seconds time to update small components.
- Reusability of Components
App developers very well know one function is defined by one component; this overall improves the components reusability. This clearly reveals that you should skip building a new component if there is already a component available to support that function. With the reuse of components, not only consistency is achieved within the project but a contribution is also made to the community. In addition, if any component becomes huge and tough to manage, it’s better to slice it up into smaller components.
- Keep Code Concise
A common rule for success in the app development world is to keep the code as short and concise as possible. It’s no different with React Native development services. One method to perform this is to avoid code duplication. It is easy to achieve this by inspecting the code for patterns as well as similarities. If you come across any, chances are high code is being repeated and it can be slowly removed. Most likely, a small part of rewriting is present to make it briefer. This relies heavily on the React reusability concept.
Wrapping Up:
The mobile app development service has picked up the pace once again with regular improvement of cross-platform frameworks like React Native. In the future, these platforms will replace the native development need from scratch. In the future, only native platforms are required for extremely small numbers of operations as well as use cases.
Whether React Native will replace or not, only time will tell. Yet, it is surely a game-changer for the app development world. Even if it fails to replace native app development, it is serving millions of web developers to build mobile apps without the necessity of a challenging domain shift across the globe.
Features can’t be missed:
- Community support
- Native-rich experience
- Streamlined web and app coupling
- Increased web development interest
- Versatility and smooth development
Chandan Kumar is working with a top-rated React Native Mobile App Development Company as a senior research analyst. With years of experience and expertise in mobile app industry, you can avail latest information on latest technologies. Stay connected for more posts in future and comments us for improvements.
