Cross App Development- I Think More Kudos Must Go To React Native

Many Techies believe that the best thing happens when not expected, React Native is no exception! It all began with the intent of Facebook to make the development across mobile platforms quicker and with fewer developer efforts. Now since it was being restricted by the specifics of the native platform languages, Facebook couldn’t update their mobile app as quick as they did their website.

As the years passed, 2013 entered React Native technology at internal Facebook hackathons. Right from internal purposes to allowing building native apps for Android, iOS and Window phone using JavaScript and React.JS components, RN at a fanatic pace went out into the big IT world and set its place among other Frontend technologies. Go through the following highlights:-

• Summer 2013 – React Native was born as a Facebook’s internal hackathon project.
• January 2015 — React.JS Conference: the first RN preview.
• March 2015 — F8 Conference: RN was announced open-source and available on GitHub.
• September 2016 — UI Toolkit was launched for RN.
• September 2017 — First Conference on RN, Poland.

Do you know the best part of using React Native app development, it is that an engineer is able to create one code base that will fit any platform without a necessity to learn iOS and Android programming languages. This approach was named “learn once, write anywhere. At present, there are more than 1,500 RN contributors with more than 12,000 commits registered on GitHub. Any of which can propose code fixes and enhancements, and after Facebook’s approval, they can be implemented and released officially.

React Native for Cross-platform development

Can you believe this there was a time when software developers used to assume that choosing cross-platform development possesses an array of unwanted risks? Everyone use to keep in mind that cross-platform product is less user-friendly in terms of reliability, design, and difficulty. Fortunately, cross-platform development tools progressed and resulted in changing the mindset of everyone.

Now cross-platform applications work with a single code base, but it works on multiple operating systems.

Native applications are what one will usually take into consideration, as soon as they think about the application. It may quite interest you to know that most of the applications in your smartphone are native ones. Unlike web apps, they are written in the languages that the platform supports. For instance, Objective-C or Swift is used to write native iOS applications, Java is used to write native Android applications and C# for the Windows phone applications. Xamarin, NativeScript, and React Native are the most common examples of cross-platform languages.

There are many reasons to love React Native, but for now let’s consider these top five.

• JavaScript is rendered into platform-specific languages- Now if you think it’s more like “make it all good” button, then it’s certainly not true! Developing with RN is still much easier and quicker than with platform-specific or hybrid development.

I mean around 80-85% of JavaScript code can be rendered to mobile platform languages with help of ready-made native components. In order to create code in JavaScript, one needs to adjust it to the UI of your selected platform. JavaScript is rendered to iOS or Android code and then an end-user receives an app that actually runs in the native code. This kind of approach makes the application run fast and look natural.

• Easy to learn- It is quite easy for any React native app development company in India to work with RN especially the ones which are experienced with the reactive programming paradigm. In addition to this, going through several tutorials and a vibrant GitHub community make it possible to master these skills quickly.

• Flexbox and SVG for an adaptive UI- One of the advantages of React Native app development is that it uses the Flexbox technology for a layout that adapts UI to all screen dimensions. This seriously saves time for development as you don’t need to adjust the code for different OS versions and screen sizes. Here is the example of Flexbox ability to transform into different screen dimensions.

• You won’t need as many developers- Most of the apps can be written by one JavaScript developer. And with the help of a lot of ready-to-use components one can succeed in fulfilling typical tasks with the phone hardware like Bluetooth, GPS, accelerometer, camera, and push notifications. There are times when you have to write components by yourself, which may be challenging if you are not acquainted with the platform-specific programming languages.

• Converting apps is easy- If the web application is already written with React, one can easily think of migrating to a RN mobile version. And this is much simpler than writing it from scratch, of course certain manipulations are needed in terms of layouts and styles. But such migration saves you heaps of time. .