For the cross-platform mobile app development for iOS and Android, React Native is a framework. React Native is the ideal solution for businesses if you wish to save time, staff resources, and money significantly. In terms of hybrid mobile app development, this progressive technology provides traditional and modern methods.
What is the reason for such popularity?
Today, we are going to share 14 reasons behind React Native being worthy of being among the world’s top technologies through this article here. You will also understand the reason behind this tool being worthy of being used as your product.
#1 It Supports Cross-Platform App Development
All the developers will surely inform you on how much of a headache it is to maintain both iOS and Android apps as they use different frameworks and are written in different languages.
Across several platforms, a single platform to develop the app means a consistent user experience.
There will be no need to learn the native programming languages in detail as there might be times wherein you might have to work with some native development almost all the time. Especially when you are integrating native SDKs for Android/iOS, but no React Native SDK is available, or when certain specific native features are not available with React Native is when it happens.
#2 Develop Apps Faster
With a large online support community that is growing by the day, React Native has been around for more than half a decade now. To the average developer, what does it means? It means that you do not have to build everything from scratch as there are tons of relevant components out there ready for use.
The chances of finding a bug in a React Native app are greatly reduced due to a single code. A Minimum Viable Product that can be built faster than ever is what it means.
By keeping everything else for later development, you can easily launch the first version of your app with bare minimum functionality as well as your MVP.
You can go ahead and build them instead of wasting your time and resources on building the detailed interfaces once you know what additional features are required. See what is working and what’s not, as you get your app out faster and they place your weight behind the things that are operating.
It means React Native apps are developed at least 30% faster with the use of a shared layer for Android and iOS.
#3: Code Push – Update Apps Without Going To The App Stores
You might realize that you missed out on a typo or wanted to tweak a smaller feature once the app is published on the App Store or the Play Store. The addition of new features means that you have to reiterate the build process and upload the updated versions of the app on the store with native apps.
The users will have to install the updated apps manually as this would then go through the approval process of Apple or Google.
These were active all before the Code Push and are being used by Apache Cordova and React Native. The app automatically updated during run time, and the users can see the changes without the need to re-launch the app with the App Center cloud service.
#4 Operating With A Tight Budget
The React Native apps can be built a lot faster than building separate Android and iOS apps, as we have already seen. The other important benefit is that money is saved while time-saving is an obvious benefit of using React Native.
You need to maximize the ROI on every penny spent when you are a small startup that is just getting off the ground. You can instead divert those resources to hire a good React Developer instead of hiring separate iOS and Android developers. Developers agree that they do not provide the best experience while there are cross-platform options, including Cordova and Xamarin.
#5 Reducing The Development Complexity
Complex tasks are made simple-to-use to read code with React. This framework is used by the UI library made by Facebook to create the codes that are easy to understand and implement the React JS.
There are different expected outcomes with the projects for App development, and it offers a simple and straightforward solution to various such issues with React Native.
“Hot Reload” is the main aspect of React Native. The app developers get a live preview of the code and its main impact, all of which co-occur while coding the app using this feature. The developers are committing the least amount of errors making the code “bug-free” with this.
The code that can be corrected or customized while the app is being uploaded is what the hot reload app means. Even during the state of change, this system gives you a state-independent perspective.
#6 It Looks like A Native App
As opposed to Phonegap or Ionic, apps built with React Native have native UI components. Instead of a native app, using the latter makes the user experience always feel web-based. React Native scores a big-time in this area.
Your applications can make use of elements that are native to the mobile designed with React Native. React Native components are aware of other native components instead of single components that render elements across both platforms. React Native combines it with its own JavaScript and takes the building blocks from the native user interface.
What is the outcome here? The user experience is greatly enhanced as the app look and works like native apps. React uses the same building blocks for Android as well as iOS, the look and feel that the users expect will be the same across both platforms.
Developers also have the option to write a mixture of native and React code to get similar functionality as a native app. It enhances the “native-like” appearance of the app on a further note.
#7 Same Programming Language Makes Things Easier
The primary code base uses the same foundation-level programming language for both iOS and Android while building an app with the use of React Native.
It is similar to deploying it both on Play Store and App Store and also building the same app. At a level of your choice, you can also recompile the app easily without any changes to the framework.
Most of your code will be written in standard JavaScript and CSS with React Native. React then runs it using the host platform’s JavaScript engine after taking your application. Without actually having to write Java or Objective C code, you get the benefits of native performance, behaviors as well as animations.
A lot of perks in terms of web development can be used here. For instance, the ability to instantly refresh your application to see the changes in your code is mostly written in JavaScript.
#8 Lots of Ready-Made Solutions And Libraries
There is plenty of ready-made solution and libraries to ease development activities with React Native.
Using the process of linting, potential errors in your code can be checked easily, and a great tool to accomplish this task in React Native is through ESLint. Thanks to tools such as flow and PropType, type checking can also be done faster now.
One of the most popular React Native libraries that accomplish State management is Redux. You can easily move heavy computation towards the server and build cloud-native apps with all these tools and libraries.
#9 Supported By Facebook
By constantly updating the framework with new features and new ways to solve our problems, Facebook is promoting React Native in a huge way. React Native has a huge developer community online as React Native is already more than half a decade old.
React Native is being adopted by more and more developers with the ease of use of the language along with cross-platform compatibility. You can see that nearly 2000 developers have committed more than 16000 times in 72 branches with a whopping 300 and above releases if you take a look at the Github repository of React Native.
Even general-purpose developers can create apps with minimal support from mobile app specialists in the absence of a steep learning curve. React Native is now becoming the de facto language for mobile app development with support from tech giants such as Facebook.
Facebook opened the door to conversations like what should be part of a certain release by creating a React Native releases repository where everyone could keep the releases of React Native in a collaborative manner in January of 2018.
#10 Personalized UX To Individual Users
To segregate Framework code, JavaScript code, styling, and Native code, React Native was built with this ability. For the app from the server-side, this means that the developers can easily create different styles.
To each individual user on the same application, the developers can now deliver a personalized user experience. One of the cornerstones of digital transformation is personalization.
You can define personalized style per user group, and each user will then be able to see their own personalized UX, the level of personalization is possible on React Native, which is very high.
#11 Third-Party Plugins
The number keeps on increasing by the day as more and more companies such as Wix start supporting it as React Native has a lot of reusable libraries that are available online.
It can be quite expensive and a time-consuming affair when it comes to building an app from scratch with the original software foundation. You need to re-use some of the existing components, and this is where 3rd party plugins come in to overcome this challenge.
With the use of specific web view functions, the third-party plugins eliminate the need. With the native module, React Native can act as the framework that connects the plugin. To help in faster loading and smoother running, along with better memory management, there are a variety of options available to link the processes.
Search the required plugin and use it to enhance the performance of the app as you head on over to your favorite React Native community or library.
#12 Developer Availability And Community
The ease with which we can find developers is a great reason to use React Native. React Native has a very robust community online backed by Facebook who does a lot of heavy lifting in the space for development.
To keep it relevant, Facebook engineers are always developing and updating the platform. React is also noted to be among the top 3 commonly used libraries.
JavaScript has allowed a larger pool of specialists to mushroom who can build the React Native apps as it is one of the most accepted programming languages. Even new developers can pick up the language quickly with JavaScript’s wide range of applications and its maturity.
By selecting React Native, you get the flexibility to select a smaller teacher of QA specialists. Programmers, designers, and more to help develop your app. Finding a new React Native Developer is easy if your current developer has left the organization in the midst of developing the app being a popular programming language.
According to some reports, smaller teams tend to be more innovative and involved.
#13 Access to Native API
Developers can imitate the look and feel of the UI very close to JavaScript and less like a framework with the use of React Native. It enables the UI to give quick responses and makes the process of development simple.
The result is the app looks indistinguishable from a native app as React Native’s components match 1:1 with native development artifacts.
Since it is compatible with native software, React Native also seamlessly integrates with the existing code. Using simple code, the developers can thereby build complex apps.
#14 Easier Debugging
It becomes quite easy with the detection of bugs being one of the biggest advantages of having a single codebase for iOS and Android. You only need to give a single update for both platforms as React code is quite reusable.
They will tell you that debugging is not the most pleasing job around as you need to ask the developer. You need to pinpoint that exact location where the developer has made a silly syntax error, as you need to spend hours looking at your and others’ code.
Your team does not have to spend countless hours looking at two different codebases with React Native. It helps you deliver consistent behavior across all platforms with a single bug that removes the bugs in all the different operating systems at once.