React Native: The Cross-Platform Framework

4 Way Technologies is one of the leading companies in React Native app development across the globe. Our highly skilled software developers are proficient in delivering powerful, robust, and feature-rich mobile apps for both the iOS and Android platforms using the react JS technology.

This blog deals with the knowledge of one of the best Cross-Platform frameworks – React Native used for developing robust mobile applications.

Let us together grab some knowledge about React Native.

Introduction

Mobile phones are quickly becoming the half soul of many individuals throughout the last few years. When we talk about Android or iOS development, organizations or individuals often get confused between offering their customers a mobile app with intuitive User Interface (UI) and impeccable User Experience (UX) or applications which are compatible with several platforms and are faster to build in the first place. And hence, there comes the unsung hero – REACT Native Development Company in the app development process.

React Native is an outstanding framework which is responsible for building a hierarchy of UI components to create the JavaScript code. It has a set of both iOS and Android platform components in order to develop a mobile app with native feel and look.

Let us take a look at the REACT Native Framework.

What is React Native? Is it really a combination of ReactJS and Native?

React Native is an open-source framework for mobile application development in addition to web application development as well. It was released by Facebook in March 2015. React Native is one of the widely used cross-platform mobile application development frameworks. It is used for Android, iOS, Web, and UWP(Universal Windows Platform).

React Native is React JS with Native platform capabilities. React Native is inspired by React, so the basic idea of the information flow is similar to it. It is easy to call native functions from React Native (Native modules).

Native modules are built-in Objective-C classes that are available in JavaScript. One instance of each module is created as per the JavaScript Bridge. They can export optional functions and constants to React Native.

The design of a React Native component depends on Native. One of the most surprising things about React Native is that it’s actually” Native. Other JavaScript-for-mobile frameworks wrap your JavaScript code in a glorified web view. They might re-implement some Native UI behavior, like the animations, but you still write a web app.

What are the Attributes of React Native?

As it is clear what React Native is and what are its two important components. Let’s move forward to the features.

It consists of Qt Port (although incomplete). For those who are not aware of Qt, it is a free and open-source widget toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces which is very helpful in the graphic designing of the applications. This is written in –

• JavaScript
• Java
• C++
• Objective-C
• Objective-C++
• Python
• It doesn’t use HTML like ReactJS, although it is evolved from ReactJS which makes it a bit easy for the React Native application developers.
• React Native’s working principles are virtually identical to ReactJS.
• It doesn’t manage the DOM via the virtual DOM.
• It runs as a foundation process(interprets the JavaScript) straightforwardly toward the front end and associates with the Native stage through serialization, asynchronous, and batched bridges.
• It was initially released on March 26, 2015.
• Its stable update 0.61.5 got released on November 23, 2019, the key feature of this update is it refreshes fastly.
• With this new stable update, there’s this new command added to troubleshoot and fix errors – React-Native Doctor.
• React Native’s development performance is faster in comparison to another cross-platform framework.
• The React Native application development team uses declarative self-contained UI components and fast development cycles to retain the speed of applications.
• React Native is the execution of ReactJS on mobile phones.

Is React Native good for your project?

After discovering some benefits of React Native, let us make sure if we can use it in a project?

• Save Money and Time

When it comes to developing an app for both Android and iOS, React Native is considered as one of the best tools available in the market. It has the capability to reduce the codebase by approximately 95%, thereby saving your money and time as well. Moreover, React Native has multiple open-source libraries of pre-built components that help you in further speeding up the process of app development.

• Create Robust Mobile Apps

React Native is an impeccable framework for mobile app development. It offers a slick, responsive, and smooth user interface, and simultaneously reduces the load time.

• Addition of Third-party Plugins

React Native also helps you in easily incorporating third-party APIs and plug-ins , including the payment systems and maps.

You should also read about the Ionic vs React native: What to choose

What are the Pros of React Native?

• It is a multi-platform development framework, that is it can be used on many platforms, for developing different kinds of applications irrespective of languages known.
• React Native applications take a shorter development time.
• It supports both live and hot reloading.
• Live Reloading – reloads or refreshes the entire application when a change is made in the file. Live Reloading is a feature that notices the changes that you are making in your files. And whenever you click “ctrl + s” to save your document or report it just reads your files, compiles them, and produces new files for the server which then reloads your application automatically so that we can see all the changes that you made.
• Hot Reloading – only refreshes the files that were changed without losing the current state of the application. Hot Reloading is to keep the application running and to add new versions of the files that you update at runtime. This way, you don’t lose any of your state which is mainly useful when you are switching the UI. Live Reloading was introduced before Hot Reloading came into the picture in the React Native Application Development Environment. Fundamentally, Hot Reloading is based on HMR (Hot Module Replacement) which was first proposed by WebPack, which we commonly use in ReactJS Applications for loading the changes at runtime.
• It is all about One-team development, i.e. it doesn’t require different teams for different platforms like Native. It just needs JavaScript Developers to write the code for all the platforms.
• This has a simplified UI, which makes it easier to use.
• It supports Live Updates and Code Push at runtime.

What are the Cons of React Native?

• React Native still contains less Native Navigation for users.
• It consists of fewer customized modules. It also lacks some components and some are partially developed, which makes it a bit difficult for the developers to work.
• Although it does have Native capabilities, Native Code used by it still needs improvement.

Conclusion

We hope you will find this article helpful. Here, we have understood that React Native mobile app development is an outstanding framework which allows the software developers to build robust mobile applications using their JavaScript knowledge. React Native also offers quicker mobile app development, and more effective code sharing across Android, Web, and iOS, without sacrificing the experience of the user and quality of the application.