Mobile phones and the various applications in the smartphone world have almost become a necessity in the modern technological world. Businesses that offer services and products on smartphones often get puzzled about whether they should offer their consumers a mobile app with a User Interface (UI) that is superlative and a User Experience (UX) that’s outstanding or offer applications that are compatible with multiple platforms and are faster to develop in the first place. This is where React Native development comes into the picture.
React Native enables developers to create an exciting and user-friendly application with the help of JavaScript only, which is supported by both Android and iOS. Developers just need to code once, and the app is available for Android and iOS devices. Largely popular and backed by Facebook, React Native has a healthy and thriving community today. To this date, React Native has got 2000+ contributors and has committed 18000+ times in 100+ branches with 330+ releases on GitHub. React Native, over time, has become the most preferred choice in the mobile app development industry, whether it is a start-up or a Fortune 500 company.
When Facebook created React Native, the original idea was to bring web development benefits, such as fast iterations and getting a single team to build one product wholly, to mobile development. Therefore, they made it happen with React Native, organizing an internal hackathon at Facebook. Since its initial release, much work has been done on technology to optimise it further and make it stable. For instance, after continuous improvements and refactoring, the start-up time of the Events Dashboard feature (initially written in React Native) became twice as fast as before. What Facebook found great about React Native is that it combined elements written in Objective-C, Java, and Swift seamlessly and smoothly, making it very simple to drop down to native code if needed.
Bloomberg is an app that provides its users with global business news, financial market news, and market data from the most trusted sources across the globe. Before the switch to React Native, Bloomberg’s team had to spend a significant amount of resources on developing for both iOS and Android. However, after testing an internal prototype made in React Native, Bloomberg decided to use it for the consumer application. The prototype built with React Native was tested rigorously before they adopted React Native for simultaneously updating the app for cross-platform performance. Due to the switch to React Native, Bloomberg engineers and developers could develop the iOS and Android applications simultaneously, sharing most of the code they wrote. It helped the developers to speed up the development process, and took only five months to build the app.
React Native’s journey at Instagram began with the porting of the Push Notification Settings and the Edit Profile views to React Native by the Core Client team. The Photos Of view was also ported to React Native to track performance when powering lists. Because of the simple nature of the UI, it did not require any building navigation infrastructure. Therefore, the development team's process was quite easy and smooth. React Native allowed product teams to build and ship newer features and add-ons faster to both Instagram iOS and Android apps. Using React Native also facilitated 85% to 99% of the code to be shared between Android and iOS apps, depending on the products.
React Native helps Wix power websites of over 110 million users. The official mobile application for Wix was completely written in React Native from scratch. Developers at Wix find React Native great because of its open-source and free nature. They also love that UIs are purely native, and the asynchronous updates for performance make the technology powerful. 80 % of the Wix application code is in JavaScript, and owing to this successful mix of React and JavaScript, the developers at Wix saved time by a margin of 3 times. In his tech talk at ReactNext 2016, Tal Kol from Wix elaborates on their experience of getting into React Native, concluding at the end that this technology is a game-changer.
Discord is free of cost, voice over IP application and digital distribution platform for videogames that is proprietary—initially designed keeping in focus smooth and clear voice communication for the video gaming community—that has image, text, and audio communication between users in a chat channel as a speciality. There are around 250 million registered Discord users. The developers over at Discord love React Native for its efficiency, performance, usability, and supportive community. The transition for the original iOS developers in the Discord team went smoother than they expected. Discord also plans to continue using React Native as it helps them bridge the gap between web and mobile.
Tesla is another popular company that uses React Native for its application. As the application is a crucial component of the user interface and user experience, Tesla works greatly on the new mobile application. The company’s choice of framework explains the company’s trend to opt for the best in any field. This React Native-powered application is used for users of Tesla vehicles and Powerwall. Using an Android or an Apple device does not make any difference as all functions to control and monitor your Tesla items, such as the charger, lights, horn, locks, and panoramic roof, are available equally on both platforms.
React Native has proven to be a game-changer, as it is more and more adopted in the mobile application industry. A plethora of mobile applications using the platform is being developed daily. It has proven to everyone that it is unique and, in reality, very futuristic. React Native’s community is always introducing exciting new projects and venturing into other platforms like React Native Windows and React Native Mac OS.
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