What to learn before learning React Native LogRocket Blog

After installing the @react-native-firebase/app NPM package, add the config plugin to the plugins array of your app.json or app.config.js. Once the above steps have been completed, the React Native Firebase library must be linked to your project and your application needs to be rebuilt. Beginning with firebase-ios-sdk v9+ (react-native-firebase https://globalcloudteam.com/ v15+) you must tell CocoaPods to use frameworks. Installing React Native Firebase requires a few steps; installing the NPM module, adding the Firebase config files & rebuilding your application. Grazitti Interactive is a global digital services provider leveraging cloud, mobile and social media technologies to reinvent the way you do business.

Thus, the REACT Native apps can be developed via using a single codebase for both the platforms simultaneously, which increased its popularity even more. React Native is a JavaScript Framework which is used to develop mobile applications for iOS and Android. Now we have all the tools we need to create a new React Native application. So let’s get started by creating the components of our mobile application.

Try the Babel REPL to see the raw JavaScript code produced by the JSX compilation step. Yes, it suffered performance issues on old devices, but React Native allowed them to do the necessary optimization which you can read more about here. That’s a LOT of stuff for a beginner, though… and the standard w3c / mozilla resources are meant as a reference more than a journey to learn. Start proactively monitoring your React Native apps — try LogRocket for free. Once React basics are covered, you can dive into advanced topics like context, component patterns, portals, and component testing.

While you don’t need to be an expert in these technologies, having a solid foundation will make learning React Native much easier. That helps development teams go-to-market faster with scalable apps that accelerate growth. When used for an app that plays to its strengths, React Native is a serious force-multiplier. It enables faster development, more responsive update cycles, and that all important “native UI” feel that consumers respond to.

Benefits of Using React Native for Mobile App Development

Their iOS app has millions of monthly active users, is 99.9% crash-free and has a 4.8-star rating on the App Store. To support my claim about the benefits of React Native, let’s first look at some examples. Here’s a few of hugely successful applications that use React Native in their code.

• Get Mark Richards’s Software Architecture Patterns ebook to better understand how to design components—and how they should interact.
• React Native renders applications using a host platform’s APIs rather than with webviews, allowing it to have a consistent look and feel.
• Building cross-platform applications can be 30% cheaper than building native apps, all thanks to the ability to reuse code and faster development, which directly impacts the cost.
• Before jumping to any conclusions, let’s see how these two frameworks compare.
• To style our components, we can either use inline styling or use StyleSheet, which is a React Native component.
• Another important feature to learn is how to use the Fetch API to get and send data to external services.

One of the biggest strengths of Reactive Native is that it uses the native app’s code to operate. This flexibility creates an almost native experience, void of inconsistencies that you may find in other cross-platform solutions. The interpretation of native code enhances the performance of your device in terms of speed.

Why You Should (or Shouldn’t) Use React Native

So, developers who work on JavaScript can easily develop mobile apps using React Native. This not only saves time but also eliminates the need for developers to learn complex languages like Objective-C and Java to develop an app. There are no real industry-related constraints on when you can or cannot use React Native. The main point is that it is a good-enough framework for all customer-facing applications that do not rely heavily on OS-specific features and integrations, e.g. AR, VR or do not need complex design or animations to establish competitive advantage.

SoundCloud lauds React Native for its speed, better access to developers , cost savings, and a thriving open-source community. Facebook is one of the most popular React Native apps, and it’s no surprise we’re mentioning it first, as it gave birth to this programming language and is the main force behind its development. If you’re interested in learning more about cross-platform frameworks, then have a look at this article. Initially developed just for iOS, Facebook quickly followed it up with Android support, before taking the framework public in 2015.

How I Built… the APOC User Guide Graph App

In the graph below, you can visualize the increasing trend for React Native. In just 1.5 years after its release, it overtook Android and iOS development. PhoneGap is a distribution of Apache Cordova, meaning that it’s powered by Cordova but has some extra tools you can use, which are provided by Adobe. “It promises you an “easy life” as a mobile app developer, enabling you to use any JavaScript library and framework that you’re comfortable working with.” – Engineers at Optasy.

Since the social media giant Facebook has developed this framework, its existence remained uncertain as Facebook has all the rights to kill off the project anytime. Though with the current popularity of the technology, it is unlikely to happen. Hence, giant companies like Facebook, Instagram, Skype, Airbnb, Tesla, Walmart, Baidu Mobile, Bloomberg, UberEATS Vogue and many more have shifted their eyeballs towards it. React Native is based on React, JavaScript library of Facebook, and XML-esque markup for developing the user interface.

But if you don’t believe me then you can check what the giants have to say about it. React Native provides support for over-the-air updates, making it extremely easy to provide to your users a seamless experience when you introduce changes to the application they are using. OTA allows you to update your apps without the need to ask your users to do any manual download. The app will simply update in the background as it is being launched. The Document Object Model is a tree structure that represents the current web page.

Facebook’s React Native app

Check all the important aspects you need to consider when developing a React Native mobile app on our blog. Flutter is easy to get started with – all you need to do is download the Flutter package, unzip it, and create an environment variable that points to a folder inside your unzipped folder. It operates based on widgets, which come in abundance, but unfortunately, aren’t adaptive.

Thus, your application will render using real mobile UI components, not webviews, and will look and feel like any other mobile application. React Native also exposes JavaScript interfaces for platform APIs, so your React Native apps can access platform features like the phone camera, or the user’s location. React Native provides a standard set of APIs for building UI components, thereby enabling developers to write code only once and run it on multiple platforms. React Native is very easy to learn for someone who is coming from a web development background. React Native is mostly based on JavaScript, a website development technology.

Both Facebook and the massive community around React Native are constantly working on improvements for the framework. If you can’t solve a problem right now because React Native doesn’t have the solution, in a few months the situation might be different. Chances are you already have someone on your team that can program in JavaScript, possibly even in ReactJS specifically. JS developers are simply easier to find compared to developers with skills in Java or Swift. Declarative style In declarative programming, developers tell an application what they are trying to achieve.

Key Steps for Mobile App Development

Even if your frontend developer has never used React Native, with some self-education they can get up to speed very quickly, especially if they’ve used React already. All you need is a little time googling to find out which web components correspond with which mobile components—and you’re set. But since React Native has gone open-source, more companies have decided to bet on it and create their mobile apps this way. According tostatista.com, by the year 2020mobile appsare set to generate $188.9 billion USD in global revenues via app stores and in-app advertising. Use native code when you need to It’s simple to drop down to native code if you need to optimize a few aspects of your application. It’s also easy to build part of your app in React Native, and part of your app using native code directly, its how the Facebook app works.

Since component logic is written in JavaScript instead of templates, you can easily pass rich data through your app and keep state out of the DOM. Build encapsulated components that manage their own state, then compose them to make complex UIs. A simple React/Flux single-page web app was developed to be used with tablet devices. Because of its web nature, many of the features UberEATS needed were simply not feasible in a browser or were very limited. One creator can only do so much with their technology and that’s why the majority of the most popular tech is open source. This provides an unlimited potential for the technology to keep developing and cover as many use cases as well as edge cases as possible.

Character Sets

This layout calculation is then offloaded to the shadow thread which constructs a tree of this layout using a layout engine called Yoga. The React Native design automates code refreshes and, instead of recompiling, it reloads the app instantly. Decided to use React Nativeto create its new consumer app after initial testing and prototyping. Declarative views make your code more predictable and easier to debug. Facebook, GitHub, Airbnb, Box, Google, Microsoft, Pinterest, Pixar Animation Studios, Twitter, Uber, Instagram, LinkedIn, and WhatsApp all use React code.

Ninety-five percent of the codebase is shared for Android and iOS; furthermore, there’s a single team that manages and develops both apps. The American grocer has been known for making bold technological decisions – and one of them was rewriting its mobile apps entirely react native developers into React Native. As mentioned earlier, React Native is written with a mixture of JavaScript and JXL, a special markup code resemblant of XML. The framework has the ability to communicate with both realms – JavaScript-based threads and existent, native app threads.

Don’t leave empty-handed

In theory, developers build their code once, in JavaScript, and React Native takes care of creating platform-specific versions. In reality, the translation between operating systems isn’t perfect, but there’s still a huge chunk of the codebase shared between platforms. React Native takes a different approach than other hybrid and mobile web models. Instead of trying to simulate native performance, it takes actual native user interface building blocks and assembles them with React’s special brand of JavaScript.

Add in the shorter time to market and it’s easy to see how the savings add up. React Native Firebase internally sets the versions of the native SDKs which each module uses. Each release of the library is tested against a fixed set of SDK versions (e.g. Firebase SDKs), allowing us to be confident that every feature the library supports is working as expected.

With React Native, you aren’t building a “mobile web app” or even a “hybrid app.” This framework allows you to create real mobile applications identical to an application built using Swift or Java. The same fundamental UI building blocks used by iOS and Android are used by React Native. These building blocks are just put together using JavaScript and React. Remember, React Native is the most popular framework for building mobile applications, and it is here to stay.